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MATTER AND SPIRIT 



BY 
PROFESSOR JAMES BIS SETT PRATT 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS 
BELIEF 

WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 

INDIA AND ITS FAITHS 

DEMOCRACY AND PEACE 

ESSAYS IN CRITICAL REALISM 

(Written in collaboration with six others) 

THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS 

MATTER AND SPIRIT: A STUDY OF 
MIND AND BODY IN THEIR RELA- 
TION TO THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



MATTER AND SPIRIT 



A STUDY OF MIND AND BODY IN THEIR 
RELATION TO THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



BY 

JAMES BISSETT PRATT, Ph.D. 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN WILLIAMS COLLEGE 



"Hew itJorfc 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1922 
All rights reserved 




Copyright, 1922, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Set up and printed. Published October, 1922. 



PBINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



OCT 18*22 

DC1A686370 



IN 

GRATEFUL MEMORY 

OF 

WILLIAM JAMES 



PREFACE 

The principal excuse for a new book on the eternal 
problem of matter and mind is just the fact that 
the problem is eternal. And not only is it eternal: 
it is so complex that there is no end of illuminating 
ways in which it may be presented. A further ex- 
cuse, if it be needed, is to be found in the many new 
attitudes toward the question which contemporary 
thought has suggested. A fairly rapid survey of the 
various answers, old and new, which have been 
given to our question — a bird's eye view, so to speak, 
of this ancient problem in its modern setting — seems 
to be called for by the times in which we live. The 
need for such a review becomes more patent the mo- 
ment one stops to consider the absolutely central 
place of the mind-body problem in metaphysical 
speculation, and the fundamental nature of meta- 
physics in knowledge and in life. If we knew just 
how mind affects body and how body affects mind 
we should have the clew to many a philosophical 
riddle, and a clew that would give us much-needed 
guidance not only in philosophy but in many a 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

region of practical, moral, and religious activity and 
experience in which our generation is groping rather 
blindly and is longing very eagerly for more light. 
If there be anything individual about this book 
it is, I suppose, its outspoken defense of Dualism. 
The time has come, as it seems to me, for those of 
us (and we are many) who refuse to be brow-beaten 
by the fantastic exaggerations of a dogmatic Nat- 
uralism and who are no longer to be fooled by the 
spiritual phraseology of a monistic Idealism which 
is really no less destructive to most of man's 
spiritual values and most of his dearest hopes than 
is Naturalism itself — it is time, I say, for those of 
us who cannot accept either of these most unem- 
pirical philosophies to come forward frankly with 
the opposing view and call ourselves dualists before 
our critics have the opportunity of branding us 
with that opprobrious title. For my part, at any 
rate, I am glad to accept the accusation and to 
be called, as a writer in a religious periodical re- 
cently called me, "an avowed dualist and un- 
ashamed." Derogatory epithets seldom hurt if 
accepted willingly. "Puritan" and "Unitarian" have 
long since become at least respectable, and even 
"Yankee" has not proved fatal. 



PREFACE ix 

The material here presented is a somewhat ampli- 
fied form of the Nathaniel W. Taylor Lectures which 
I delivered at the Yale Divinity School in April, 
1922. One of the additions to the original addresses 
— which is now the latter part of Lecture I — 
appeared, in modified form, in the Journal of Phi- 
losophy; * and to the editors of that periodical I am 
indebted for their kind permission to reprint it here. 
Most of all am I indebted to my kind hosts at New 
Haven — notably Professor Sneath, Professor Macin- 
tosh, and Dean Brown — for the stimulus and the 
encouragement which made the original lectures pos- 
sible and which emboldened me to publish them in 
their present form. 

Williamstown, Mass., 
July, 1922. 

iFor June 22, 1922; under the title "The New Materialism." 



CONTENTS 

LECTURE PAGE 

I The Mind-Body Problem and the Mate- 
rialistic Solution 3 

II Parallelism 48 

III The Denial of the Problem . . .89 

IV The Difficulties of Interaction . .131 

V A Dualism of Process 167 

VI The Consequences of Dualism in Moral- 

ity and Religion 197 

Index 231 



MATTER AND SPIRIT 



MATTER AND SPIRIT 



LECTURE I 

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM AND THE MATERIALISTIC 
SOLUTION 

It is a reproach commonly leveled against meta- 
physics that the problems it deals with are immeas- 
urably remote from the life of man. To their re- 
moteness from life is usually attributed both their 
apparent insolubility and their alleged lack of real 
importance. Plainly, therefore, the question of their 
importance and of the possibility of their solution 
would take on a very different aspect, even to the 
popular mind, if it could be shown that one of the 
most crucial and fundamental of all metaphysical 
problems is to be found not in the starry heavens 
nor in the distant aeons of unimaginable time, but 
centering round a process that is going on within the 
psychophysical organism of each one of us at every 
moment of his waking life. That such is the actual 
situation is my firm belief, — a conviction that grows 

3 



4 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

upon me with every year of further pondering. I 
refer, of course, to the processes found in sensation 
and voluntary activity. If we could understand what 
really happens when we see each other's faces, or 
when we lift our hands or speak each other's names, 
we should have the clue to many a mystery; and the 
point of view that we shall take upon the nature of 
these common events will determine for us the major 
portion of our metaphysics. 

The crucial significance of the mind-body relation 
is no new discovery. Not only the ancient Greek 
philosophers, but thousands of years before them 
primitive men the world over made it the starting 
point of their thought and based upon their particu- 
lar solution of this question nearly the whole of their 
philosophy of life and nature. But while they un- 
derstood very well the decisive position of this prob- 
lem they had little inkling of its real difficulty, nor 
did they even imagine the varied ways in which the 
mind-body relation is capable of being expressed. 
As a fact, since the days of the Greek philosophers 
some eight or nine different solutions have been 
offered, and as much of the best philosophic thought 
has busied itself with this problem for many centu- 
ries it seems unlikely that anything very radically 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 5 

new will be suggested in the future. In fact it can 
be shown in something like mathematical fashion 
that we have in our hands already all the possible 
solutions. For either body and mind are causally 
related or they are not. If for the present we leave 
on one side the denial of such relationship, the 
number of possible ways in which they may be re- 
lated is obviously limited. I hasten to add that I 
mean the word "causally" as used above to be taken 
in sufficiently large fashion to include every kind of 
implication or influence; and that for our present 
purposes the word body, or matter, may be inter- 
preted in either realistic or idealistic fashion. What- 
ever interpretation we put upon matter, idealists and 
realists alike will acknowledge that the words mat- 
ter and mind have distinguishable meanings. With 
so much agreed upon, we can easily work out the 
chief ways in which the two may conceivably be re- 
lated. If for the moment we omit detailed variations 
within the principal groups, there are four and only 
four of such possible relations. Firstly, mind and 
body may mutually influence each other. Secondly, 
body may alone be causally effective and mind 
merely a result. Thirdly, mind and body may flow 
on parallel with each other, each causally efficient 



6 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

within its own banks, so to speak, but neither ever 
affecting the other. Fourthly, mind alone may be 
efficient, and body merely a resultant or appearance 
of mind. Variations of detail may be suggested and 
have been suggested within most of these principal 
types of relationship; but plainly no other relation- 
ship of a general nature is thinkable. The diagram 
on page 7 will, I trust, make plainer the four types 
of theory and their principal subdivisions. 

If, then, mind and body are causally related their 
relation must be one of the four kinds here suggested. 
And if, either by positive arguments in favor of one 
of these views, or negatively through the elimination 
of three of them, we can determine which of the 
four is true, we shall find not only that this particu- 
lar problem is solved, but that we have a new and 
piercing light into many a hitherto obscure corner 
of our universe — a light which may dissipate not only 
some of our theoretical doubts but even some of 
our practical uncertainties. 

The first of the four general views that I men- 
tioned above, commonly referred to as the theory of 
Interaction, is naturally the first to present itself to 
the naive mind. It appears indeed to rest upon 
actually observed facts — in sensation we seem to find 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 7 



THEOBIES OE THE RELATIONS OE MIND .AND BODY 



'_*r\*c 



-^ — -> 



Interaction 



, — v-^-> — **> Mind a Form of Matter 

' Mind an Epiphenomenon 
"> caused by Matter 



Materialism 



r 



-> — > 



Dualistic Parallelism 



->. — > 



m < 



2 Materialistic Parallelism 



— » > > 

3 Each an Aspect of the Oflier 

— > — ** — * 



>v 



Each an Aspect of a 
Tertium Quid. 



Double 
)> Aspect 
View 



> Parallelism 



5 Idealistic Parallelism 

— ^ — *> — > 



Note. — In each case the arrows in the upper line represent mind, 
those in the lower line matter or physical energy. The light arrows 
indicate a real entity, the heavy black an epiphenomenon, appearance, 
or aspect. 



8 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

a physical process operating upon our consciousness, 
and in volition we feel ourselves, as psychical beings, 
operating upon the physical world. It is not strange, 
therefore, that Interaction should be the first theory 
of mind and body to be explicitly developed, both by 
the individual and by the race. Primitive man 
founded his animistic philosophy upon it; and both 
Socrates and Plato were convinced interactionists. 
They made a sharp distinction between body and 
soul, a distinction which they regarded as of the ut- 
most importance; and it could easily be shown that 
most of their moral and religious teachings and much 
of their cosmic speculation would go to pieces if 
based on any other foundation than the interaction 
theory. It was an essential part of the larger Pla- 
tonic dualism, and it formed the basis of Plato's firm 
conviction in the soul's immortality. The rise of 
Christianity brought additional strength to the doc- 
trine, for the Christian Fathers regarded body and 
soul as distinct entities and in their mutual influence 
upon each other they found much of the cosmic strug- 
gle centering. It was not strange that with Chris- 
tianity and Platonism uniting their forces in its sup- 
port the doctrine of Interaction should have held the 
field almost without a rival for well over 1,500 years. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 9 

With the rise of modern natural science, however, 
new considerations and new motives appeared upon 
the scene which were destined to put Interaction upon 
the defensive and give its rivals an enormous advan- 
tage. A new conception of physical nature came over 
men's minds. Mathematical and mechanical laws 
were found to dominate regions of the universe 
where their presence had hardly been suspected. 
Everywhere quality came to be reduced to quantity, 
the indefinite to the measurable. Once the mechan- 
istic explanation was thoroughly applied to the inor- 
ganic world the attempt to extend it to the realms 
of life and mind became inevitable. And this for 
two reasons. The world of living matter being made 
of the same elements as the inorganic world, and 
forming as it does so minute a portion of the whole 
of Nature, it seemed most improbable that the laws 
which hold everywhere else should be subject to 
exception in this little corner. And secondly it was 
seen that the extension of mechanical law to this 
last region would make the entire physical universe 
an open book to science, all of it at length being 
susceptible to the same sort of description, explana- 
tion, and prediction. The door to this last conquest 
of mechanistic science was, oddly enough, opened by 



10 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

the greatest interactionist of his century, Rene 
Descartes. For, though he maintained that body and 
mind were absolutely distinct in man, he taught that 
animals were merely automata, and that all their 
actions must be accounted for on mechanical princi- 
ples only. It was but a step from this to the sugges- 
tion that in man also consciousness, though of course 
present, never interfered with the activities of the 
body and that all these might be explained by 
physical laws alone. Two further advances of Sci- 
ence, made in the 19th Century, added enormously 
to the strength of this naturalistic attack upon Inter- 
action. These were the formulation of the law of 
the conservation of energy and the Darwinian doc- 
trine of evolution. For if no energy can ever be 
created or destroyed, plainly mind cannot interfere 
with bodily processes; and since 'man is descended 
from the lower animals* there is no reason why his 
actions should not be explicable by the same general 
law as theirs. 

Thus it has come about that when the natural 
scientist approaches the mind-body problem he al- 
most invariably rules out Interaction first of all, as 
being quite out of the question. This procedure he 
justifies by two general reasons. The first is the 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 11 

incompatibility, already referred to, of Interaction 
with the mechanical view of physical nature, and in 
particular with the law of the conservation of energy. 
The second reason is of a more philosophical sort — 
the difficulty, namely, that has been pointed out ever 
since the days of Descartes in seeing how two such 
diverse things as matter and mind could possibly af- 
fect each other. How indeed can one imagine an 
idea producing a motion in the matter of the brain? 
As easily, says Clifford, might we picture the two 
halves of a heavy train kept together by the feelings 
of amity between the stoker and the guard. 

The naturalistic movement, having discredited In- 
teraction, was bound to offer some theory of mind 
and body in its place. As a fact it offered two, each 
of which in turn possessed two or more variations, 
I refer to Materialism and Parallelism. Materialism 
in its origin was largely a psychological reaction 
from the extreme spiritualistic position of scholasti- 
cism. It has two sub-types although its adherents 
have not always recognized the fact nor distinguished 
them clearly enough in their own minds for us to be 
invariably certain which of the two types, in any 
given case, they are upholding. The first of these 
materialistic views maintains that consciousness is a 






12 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

form of brain activity; — that it is either some fine 
and subtle kind of matter, or (more commonly) some 
form of energy, either kinetic or potential. This type 
of Materialism had a considerable vogue in Buchner's 
day, but fortunately for your patience we need not 
dwell upon it, for it has been pretty generally dis- 
credited. To say that consciousness is a form of 
matter or of motion is to use words without meaning. 
The identification of consciousness and motion in- 
deed can never be refuted; but only because he who 
does not see the absurdity of such a statement can 
never be made to see anything. Argument against 
any given position must regularly take the general 
form of the reductio ad absurdam. He, therefore, 
who chooses at the beginning a position which is as 
absurd as any that can be imagined is in the happy 
situation of being armor proof against all argument. 
He can never be "reduced to the absurd" because he 
is already there. If he cannot see that, though con- 
sciousness and motion may be related as intimately 
as you please, we mean different things by the two 
words, that though consciousness may be caused by 
motion, it is not itself what we mean by motion any 
more than it is green cheese — if he cannot see this 
there is no arguing with him. But while we cer- 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 13 

jtainly cannot convince him we may properly ignore 
ihim in all discussions of the subject; for he has put 
'himself in a position where all discussion is im- 
possible. 

We turn, therefore, to the much more defensible 
form of Materialism which declares that while con- 
sciousness is not to be identified with anything 
physical it is caused by physical processes that occur 
iin the brain, and that it, on its side, never influences 
either the brain processes nor any subsequent por- 
tions of its own stream. In the words of Professor 
Warren: "Intelligence is a function not of conscious 
'intuition' but of the connection between afferent and 
efferent nerve tracts. It denotes an adjustment be- 
tween the environmental situation and the responsive 
activity, and this adjustment is brought about either 
!by inherited neural paths or by individually ac- 
quired connections. The motor impulse in every case 
presumably follows the path of least resistance. 
There is no need to assume a non-physical 'guiding' 
agent in order to explain why the nervous current 
comes to follow certain paths rather than others." 
"The mechanics of intelligent activity follows the 
same pattern as other movements and transforma- 
tions of energy. . . . The laws of physics and chem- 



14 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

istry hold for intelligent organisms as well as for 
atoms and electrons." * Consciousness, in other 
words, is always a result, never a cause; every por- 
tion of every psychic state is fully determined by the 
accompanying or preceding brain state. It is the 
universal mechanical laws of the physical world that 
produce and regulate and fix our thoughts; our pre- 
ceding thoughts and the laws of logic having no real 
efficacy in the matter whatever. Consciousness, in 
short, is but "a lyric cry in the midst of business." 2 
In support of this proposition the materialist points 
first of all to the scientific presuppositions that we 
have already discussed — the universality of mechan- 
ical law, the conservation of energy, the evolution 
of man and of man's consciousness. More specifi- 
cally he dwells upon the following considerations. 
Comparative anatomy shows a fairly close correla- 
tion between brain capacity and mental ability. Re- 
cent studies in brain anatomy have enabled us to 
locate in various definite portions of the cortex the 
centers of sensation and the centers that control mus- 
cular action. The destruction of any of these cen- 



1 "The Mechanics of Intelligence," Phil. Rev., XXVI, pp. 615 and 
617. 

2 Santayana's picturesque expression, see his Discussion in the 
Journal of Philosophy, III, p. 412. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 15 

ters results in the destruction or derangement of the 
corresponding functions of consciousness. It would 
seem, therefore, to follow, he argues, that conscious- 
ness is dependent upon brain. 

The facts and principles to which the materialist 
appeals, however, are not conclusive. Both the 
parallelist and even the discouraged interactionist 
have their answers. United for once against a com- 
mon foe, they point out that the facts of brain anat- 
omy and physiology upon which the materialist relies 
are perfectly compatible with both Parallelism and 
Interaction. The interactionist has never denied — 
on the contrary, he has affirmed — that certain proc- 
esses in the brain produce changes in consciousness; 
and the parallelist always insists that for every men- 
tal process there is a correlated brain process. In 
fact the parallelist goes farther than this and as- 
serts that not only are the facts in question consistent 
with all three theories, but that the general princi- 
ples of Naturalism, to which the materialist first of 
all appealed, are really inconsistent with Materialism. 
For if some of the physical energy in the brain is 
used in producing something (viz. consciousness) 
which is not physical, the doctrine of the conserva- 
tion of energy is abrogated; you will have physical 



16 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

energy being destroyed — destroyed, that is, from the 
point of view of the physical world which alone in 
this question need to be considered. 

There are, moreover, certain further considera- 
tions which seem to make the materialistic position 
quite untenable. The materialist has appealed to 
the evolution of human consciousness. Conscious- 
ness was not created, he tells us; it has developed, and 
is to be accounted for by Natural Selection. This 
view is obviously essential to his position, and in 
fact it was this view of the origin and development 
of consciousness that has led many a scientist to a 
materialistic interpretation of the relation of mind 
and body. Possibly something might be said on the 
other side. Possibly Natural Selection does not tell 
the whole story. Let us, however, take the material- 
ist at his word and see for ourselves the exact conse- 
quences and implications of his evolutionary view. 
Consciousness, then, developed through the action 
of Natural Selection. That is to say, those individ- 
uals and those species whose reactions were influ- 
enced by conscious factors, such as sensation, pleas- 
ure, pain, memory, judgment, etc., had an advantage 
over their unconscious or less conscious rivals and 
were enabled thereby the better to escape danger, 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 17 

procure food, and rear their young. This natural- 
istic explanation will hold both for consciousness in 
igeneral and for each conscious function in particular. 
Thus the emotion of fear with its strong impulse to 
flee or hide was selected and developed because of its 
biological utility, because the animal who felt afraid 
;in certain circumstances was more likely to escape 
danger than one who had no conscious reaction to a 
really dangerous situation. In other words, both con- 
sciousness as a whole and each of its parts, aspects, 
or functions has been selected and developed because 
of its beneficial effect upon the behavior of the organ- 
ism. Had it had no such effect, animal organisms 
would have developed as purely unconscious auto- 
mata. So says the evolutionist and so says the 
materialist. 

But, alas for the absent-minded materialist, he has 
forgotten one thing — in fact just the most funda- 
mental principle of his whole mind-body doctrine. 
This fundamental principle, as you will all recall, is 
the assertion that consciousness has and can have no 
effect upon behavior whatsoever. Consciousness, 
says Materialism, is always an effect, never a cause. 
It was, indeed, just fear of allowing consciousness 
any influence over bodily activities that prompted the 



18 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

whole materialistic movement. Since consciousness, 
therefore, can have no influence, good or bad, upon 
the reactions of the organism, the evolutionary ex- 
planation of it, as due to Natural Selection, must be 
false. What then will the materialist suggest? Spe- 
cial creation is not to his taste; he will not be likely 
to turn to the Creator and ask for His assistance. 
Yet he may well feel that nothing short of divine 
intervention will save him in his sudden and bitter 
discovery that he has unintentionally, inadvertently, 
but none the less inevitably and irretrievably, de- 
clared war upon Darwin and all the evolutionists. 

Let us continue a little farther the line of thought 
suggested by the materialist's denial of efficiency to 
consciousness. Since consciousness never interferes 
with physical processes, never affects them in any 
way, the whole of man's civilization, the sum total of 
his achievements, both material and spiritual, must 
be ascribed to purely physical laws. The whole tre- 
mendous mass of it through all the ages would have 
come about just the same if no scientist or inventor 
had ever had a thought, no poet or artist a sentiment, 
no moral or religious teacher an aspiration or ideal, 
no patriot a feeling of loyalty, no mother an emotion 
of love. But leaving these things on one side, let us 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 19 

consider in more detail one aspect of the denial of 
the efficiency of consciousness which should be of par- 
ticular interest to our materialistic friend. Conscious- 
ness, he will remind us, is always an effect and never 
a cause. And this means, if Materialism is to be self- 
consistent, that every psychic state, every feeling and 
every thought, is determined in its totality by the 
correlated brain process and never in any degree by 
any preceding psychic state. To say that a thought 
is even in a minute degree a co-cause of the follow- 
ing thought would be to wreck Materialism. In the 
process known as reasoning, therefore, it is a mistake 
to suppose that consciousness of logical relations has 
anything whatever to do with the result. It is not 
logical necessity but mechanical necessity that 
squeezes out our so-called reasoned conclusions. 
Take the familiar syllogism: 

All men are mortal. 
Socrates is a man. 
. "• Socrates is mortal. 
The materialist assures us that we should be falling 
back into the primitive superstitions of a pre-natural- 
istic age should we suppose that either of the pre- 
mises had anything to do with our arriving at the 
conclusion. We finally assert that Socrates is mortal 



20 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

not because we have in mind the mortality of all men 
and the humanity of Socrates, nor for any other 
logical or psychological reason; but because certain 
mechanical processes in our brains force that thought 
into consciousness. Thus no conclusion is ever ar^ 
rived at because of logical necessity. There is no 
logical necessity among mental processes but only 
physical necessity. The truth is, according to Ma- 
terialism, we think the way we have to think, the 
way our mechanical brains constrain us to think. We 
may happen to think logically; but if we do, this is 
not because logic had anything to do with our con- 
clusion, but because the brain molecules shake down, 
so to speak, in a lucky fashion. It is plain, therefore, 
that no conclusion that we men can reach can ever 
claim to be based on logic. It is forever impossible 
to demonstrate that any thesis is logically necessary. 
If we happen to entertain it we do, that is all; for 
demonstration is out of the question. 

This seems plainly to be the inevitable outcome of 
the materialist doctrine. And it gives an interesting 
and somewhat surprising turn to the discussion. For 
suppose at this point we ask the materialist why he 
maintains that Materialism is true. If he hopes to 
convince us he can only reply that he considers Ma- 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 21 

terialism true because it is the logical conclusion 
from certain admitted facts, or that the falseness of 
all other theories can be logically demonstrated. . . . 
The hopeless self-contradiction of such a position is 
obvious. With one breath the materialist asserts that 
his doctrine is logically demonstrable and that there 
is no such thing as logical demonstration. As Brad- 
ley has put it, no theory can be true which is incon- 
sistent with the possibility of our knowing it to be 
true. 

Materialism, in the form I have presented, is as 
old as Biichner, or much older. In his day it had 
great popularity, but considerations such as those out- 
lined above so discredited it that in the genera- 
tion just past it seemed almost dead. Twenty years 
ago it had few serious defenders beside Professor 
Haeckel, whose courage in sticking to it reminded 
one forcibly of the boy who stood on the burning 
deck, whence all but he had fled. Eventually, in 
fact, the place got too hot even for Professor Haeckel, 
and shortly before his death he deserted this extreme 
form of Materialism and went over to the Double 
Aspect theory. In our day, however, there are signs 
of a revival of Materialism. Not to mention scien- 
tists like Loeb, there are several philosophers of re- 



22 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

pute who are attempting to breathe new life into the 
dry bones of the old theory. Among the leaders of 
this movement I shall mention only Professors War- 
ren, Montague, Sellars, Santayana, and perhaps Pro- 
fessor Strong. Mr. Santayana, for his own part, is 
convinced of the absurdity of attributing physical ef- 
ficacy to consciousness, 1 but is not interested in mak- 
ing serious effort for the conversion of those who still 
cling to "superstitious" and "magical" views. It is 
doubtful whether Mr. Strong should be included 
among the materialists. When he wrote the book. 
"Why the Mind Has a Body," he was an enthusiastic 
parallelist; his recent work on "The Origin of Con- 
sciousness," however, leaves me quite in the dark as 
to where he should be classed. Certainly he has 
moved far in the direction of Materialism since his 
first book was finished. If he really belongs to the 
materialist group his Materialism consists in an iden- 
tification of psychic states with material particles. 
Such a position is, of course, open to the same very 
serious objections as the first form of the older Ma- 
terialism. At times Mr. Strong seems to attempt a 

x Cf. the "Life of Reason" passim, notably the chapter "How 
Thought is Practical," in "Reason and Common Sense"; also his 
discussion on the Efficacy of Thought in the Journal of Philosophy, 
III, pp. 410-12. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 23 

justification of it by distinguishing between the psy- 
chical and the conscious. In addition to this distinc- 
tion one must keep in mind Professor Strong's funda- 
mental doctrine that introspection is always indirect 
and of the past. If we put these considerations to- 
gether one may argue that we are never directly con- 
scious of our psychic states and hence that they may, 
for aught we know, be identical with the brain. Yet 
I cannot see that this really avoids the old difficulty; 
tfor if psychic states are really psychic it is hard to 
put any meaning into the assertion that they are 
brain; and if they are not really psychic the cogniz- 
ing of them must be, and the old difficulty will break 
out in a new place. Furthermore, it is exceedingly 
difficult for me, at least, to see how Panpsychism (to 
which Professor Strong still clings) is to be made con- 
sistent with his Critical Realism, or to understand 
how a psychic state can be extended and possess 
really (not as mere appearance) the various pri- 
mary qualities. If it is by considerations such as 
these that the ills of Materialism are to be cured I 
fear the cure will prove worse than the disease. How- 
ever, I am not at all sure that Professor Strong means 
this for Materialism, for, as I have said, he still clings 
(with modifications) to the panpsychic doctrine of 



24 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

his former days; and the "brain" which we contem- 
plate retrospectively when we introspect our (past) 
psychic states does not seem to be the same "brain" 
which an outsider might examine with eye and hand. 
I should not therefore feel justified in including him 
among the new materialists, although many passages 
in "The Origin of Consciousness" seem to indicate 
that he is one. 

Nor is it strictly correct to classify Professor War- 
ren as a materialist, for he still clings to the Double- 
Aspect theory of Parallelism. Yet much of his writ- 
ing on the mind-body problem x is in defense of the 
thesis that all man's activities are explicable on me- 
chanical or (very likely) physico-chemical princi- 
ples; so that in effect if not in name he is a defender 
of the new Materialism. The form which this de- 
fensive argument assumes, however, is a little difficult 
to make out. It seems, taken in the large, to consist 
of two closely related parts. In the first place it 
maintains that even the most complex forms of 
thoughtful activity are built on the same general plan 
as ordinary ideo-motor action, and that, inasmuch as 



i'The Mental and the Physical," Psy. Rev., March, 1914; "A 
Study of Purpose," Jour, of Phil., Jan. and Feb., 1916; "The 
Mechanics of Intelligence," Phil. Review, Nov., 1917; "Mechanism 
versus Vitalism," Phil. Review, Nov., 1918. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 25 

the latter can be fully explained mechanically, the 
highest forms of intelligent conduct need no further 
explanation. The other form of Professor Warren's 
argument consists in pointing us to a brain correlate 
for every type of conscious process, including even 
the most complicated and "intelligent." 

As to the first of these arguments, it must be plain 
to all that the similarity between ideo-motor and "in- 
telligently guided" action is accepted and demonstra- 
ble only so far as it is irrelevant to the present issue ; 
and that when the similarity is depicted in such terms 
as to make it relevant to the issue and decisive, the 
presentation of it as a fact begs the question. That 
there is a similarity of a very general sort between all 
forms of bodily activity, that they all have stimulus, 
central process, and response, will be denied by no 
one; but to assert in addition to this that increased 
neural complexity is the only other factor involved in 
deliberately guided voluntary action beside what one 
finds in automatic reaction is to start with the con- 
clusion which was to be proved. As I read it, at 
any rate, Professor Warren's attempted reduction of 
intelligent activity to the type of ideo-motor action 
either amounts merely to a harmless pointing out of 
irrelevant similarities, or else reads into the com- 



26 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

parison identities which he has done nothing to prove, 
and which cannot be admitted in advance without 
begging the question. 

Professor Warren, however, seems to make his po- 
sition more persuasive by the aid of his second argu- 
ment. He of course does not deny that certain 
"higher" and more complex intellectual processes are 
involved in such things as chess playing than in mere 
ideo-motor action. But in all these, he assures us, the 
really efficient factor is the brain aspect of the psy- 
chical process. It is the "neural processes known 
introspectively as 'thoughts' of future situations" 1 
which really govern the movement of the chess 
pieces. Similarly "satisfaction appears to be the sub- 
jective aspect of a neural condition stimulated by 
systematic processes which are autonomically in- 
duced." 2 "Conscious endeavor to deliberate is a 
[neural] set in some direction." "Purpose" must 
not be taken to mean a conscious desire for a con- 
sciously conceived achievement but must be inter- 
preted in behavioristic, and ultimately in physio- 
logical terms. 3 When all conscious processes have 



1 "The Mechanics of Intelligence," p. 613. 

2 Ibid., p. 618. 

3 "A Study of Purpose," passim; also "Mechanism vs. Vitalism," 
p. 61 j. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 27 

been thus translated into neural terms, the explana- 
tion of the most complex human conduct, as, for ex- 
ample, chess playing, on purely physico-chemical prin- 
ciples becomes relatively easy. "The complexity of 
the thought process means that a large number of 
neural connections within the brain are formed prior 
to each play. Intelligence means, in neural terms, 
that the less satisfying plays find no motor outgo — 
that only one out of many incipient reactions is com- 
pleted." x 

It would be unjust, I think, to accuse Professor 
Warren of begging the question in this argument. 
One might indeed justifiably do so if the argument 
be interpreted as an attempt to prove Materialism. 
Plainly it proves Materialism only on condition that 
we admit the neural interpretation of intelligence to 
be the sole proper interpretation; only if we start 
with the conclusion that intelligence as such has noth- 
ing to do with action. But as I understand Professor 
Warren, he does not mean to have his argument 
taken in so ambitious a sense. He wishes merely to 
show us what the materialistic hypothesis is, to show 
that it is possible to express human conduct in 
physico-chemical terms and that Materialism is a per- 

1 "The Mechanics of Intelligence," 613. 



28 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

fectly statable view, even in face of such seemingly 
intelligent action as chess playing. 

If this is Professor Warren's point I think he has 
made it. Materialism is a perfectly statable hypoth- 
esis. The question still remains, Is it true? Is it or 
is the opposing hypothesis true? For as Professor 
Warren recognizes, the anti-materialistic view of in- 
telligent activity is also perfectly statable. We have, 
in short, on our hands the two opposing hypotheses 
that we have always had, and the difficulties of each 
are exactly what they always were. The trouble 
with Professor Warren's type of Materialism has al- 
ways been that it denies the efficiency of conscious- 
ness and thereby gets itself into all the tangle of 
difficulties faintly suggested earlier in this lec- 
ture. Nor can I see that Professor Warren has 
done anything to avoid or to diminish those difficul- 
ties. In fact he seems at times not even to realize 
what they are. At the close of his paper on "The 
Mechanics of Intelligence" he deals briefly with "the 
role of consciousness," and all he has to say as to the 
dangers which Materialism runs in denying to con- 
sciousness all real efficiency is the following: "How- 
ever much my actions may be determined mechan- 
istically or unconsciously or subconsciously, it is my 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 29 

conscious experiences, — my perceptions, feelings, 
imaginings and thoughts, — that mean life to me. 
The proved value of consciousness is the subjective 
life which it furnishes to the mind." x 

It is of course plain that this response does not 
even come in sight of the real difficulties involved in 
the denial of the efficiency of consciousness — difficul- 
ties which resulted in the almost universal rejection 
of Materialism twenty years ago. My conclusion, 
therefore, is that, so far as Professor Warren's argu- 
ments are concerned, the New Materialism is in no 
better case than the old and that, like its predeces- 
or, it demands of us an amount of credulity ut- 
erly unjustifiable by any considerations it has to 
offer. 

No one, I imagine, sees more plainly the difficulties 
we have just been considering than Professor Mon- 
tague. To him, as to most anti-materialists, the ef- 
ficiency of consciousness is so obvious that it is futile 
to deny it. In fact it is with great hesitation that I 
include him among the materialists. In many re- 
spects his view approximates closely to Interaction. 
Yet I have two reasons for calling him a materialist 
which, I think, justify me in doing so: the first is 

1 "The Mechanics of Intelligence," p. 620. 



30 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

that he calls himself one/ and the second that he 
identifies consciousness with a form of physical 
energy in the brain, much as did the first form of the 
older Materialism. His improvement upon the older 
view consists in giving up the obviously absurd asser- 
tion that consciousness is the motion of brain mole- 
cules and suggesting instead that it may be some 
form of potential energy stored up in the brain, and 
presumably at the synapses. It was in this form that 
Professor Montague first expressed his hypothesis in 
his paper, "Are Mental Processes in Space?" 2 and 
in his contribution 3 to the " Essays Philosophical and 
Psychological in Honor of William James," both pub- 
lished in 1908. The thought was carried farther, with 
certain epistemological modifications, in his essay on 
"Truth and Error" in the "New Realism" (1912), in 
which he identified consciousness with causality. 
More recently in his paper on "Variation, Heredity, 
and Consciousness" 4 he has proposed a new analysis 
of potential energy which in his opinion makes the 
identification of it with consciousness the more ac- 
ceptable. According to this most recent suggestion, 

1 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XXI, p. 47. 
2 Monist, XVIII, 21-29. 

3 "Consciousness as a Form of Energy." 

4 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 1920, pp. 13-50. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 31 

just as kinetic energy is motion, potential energy is 
rest. A mass may move, and it also may stick to the 
same spot. It may move fast and it may also stick 
fast. And as there are many degrees of the fastness 
with which a thing may move, so there may be many 
degrees of the fastness with which it may stick. Just 
as motion may have any number of positive veloci- 
ties, so rest, which is negative motion or negative 
energy, may have any number of degrees of negative 
velocity. This "negative energy would be a tend- 
ency to cling or endure in one position. It would, 
perhaps, be related to velocity as inertia is related to 
acceleration." 

For this new concept of relative immovability, or 
negative energy, Professor Montague proposes the 
new name anergy. His thesis now takes the form of 
asserting that the anergy present at the synapses of 
the brain is to be identified with consciousness. 
"When a vibration-wave proceeding over a sensory 
nerve is gradually brought to a stop by the resistance 
of the synapse, its energy is transformed from a visi- 
ble kinetic form to an invisible and potential form. 
As its velocity passes through the zero-phase, its 
slowness passes through an infinity-phase. I ask you 
to entertain the suggestion that this infinity-phase of 



32 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

slowness is the common stuff of all sensations and 
that the critical points of zero and infinity through 
which the motion and slowness respectively pass af- 
ford the basis for that qualitative absoluteness and 
discontinuity that differentiate sensations from mere 
rates of change." * In other words, the potential 
energy stored up within the synapses is conscious- 
ness; and since there are as many rates of slowness 
or "anergy" below the zero point of motion as there 
are rates of vibration above it, there is ample room 
for all the variations which we find in conscious 
life. 

Professor Montague has been at great pains to 
build up a new conception of potential energy and 
"anergy/' and it is, I fear, a little unkind and un- 
friendly to assert that in all this he has done nothing 
to make the identification of consciousness with brain 
energy any easier. Nevertheless, that is the conclu- 
sion to which I am driven. It may perhaps be true 
that some of the difficulties which the imagination 
feels in identifying consciousness with moving mole- 
cules is avoided if instead of calling it motion we tuck 
it away quietly in the synapses where it may be out 
of sight, and make it less obtrusive to the mind's eye 

1 Op. cit., p. 42. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 33 

by keeping it very quiet at many degrees of motion- 
lessness. But in the last analysis it is really as im- 
possible to put meaning into the assertion that con- 
sciousness is rest as into the assertion that it is mo- 
tion. Once and for all, by our psychic states we mean 
one thing, and by the physical states of our brains we 
mean another; and it makes no difference whether 
these latter be interpreted as motion or as rest, as 
quantitative or qualitative, as kinetic or potential, as 
energy or anergy. 

I hasten to add that Professor Montague fore- 
saw just this criticism and has left no stone un- 
turned to find an answer to it. In the first place he 
points out that his view of matter and of mind are 
very different from that of Descartes; that matter 
should be conceived as possessing the secondary as 
well as the primary qualities; and that "each man 
feels his consciousness to pervade not only his body 
but the outer space in which objects appear." 1 If 
the limits of this lecture permitted it would be possi- 
ble to show that both of these assertions would be 
very hard to prove, and a theory which rested upon 
them would be in much the same predicament as that 
of a house built upon the sand. As to the latter as- 

1 "Consciousness as a Form of Energy," p. 120. 



34 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

sertion especially one wonders whether in Professor 
Montague's opinion the potential energy in the 
synapses of my cortex, which is identical with my 
consciousness, also "pervades the outer space in which 
objects appear." It is not necessary for our present 
purposes, however, to go into these matters; for even 
if we present Professor Montague with all the sec- 
ondary qualities he wishes for his material world and 
endow his consciousness (and also his cortex) with 
the magical power of pervading all space, the identi- 
fication of thought with brain energy would still be 
as absurd as ever. All the secondary qualities and 
all the pervasion of space imaginable will not help 
us in the least to see how his thought of Julius Caesar 
can be a certain amount of anergy in his frontal or 
occipital lobes. Professor Montague argues that if 
we accept his non-Cartesian view of space and con- 
sciousness, "then the change of the kinetic energy of 
the stimulus into the potential energy of the sensa- 
tion will not be a mysterious change of sheer quantity 
into quality." * This may be admitted, and the more 
willingly since it completely misses the point of the 
objection and still fails to put any meaning into the 
identification of consciousness with a "qualitative 

1 Op. cit., p. 131. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 35 

form of stress" in the brain synapses. Nor does it 
help matters to identify consciousness, as Professor 
Montague proposes to do, with the "higher phases of 
intensive energy." 1 Finally, the series of analogies 
which are pointed out in several of Professor Monta- 
gue's articles between potential energy and conscious- 
ness, while mildly interesting, are quite as unper- 
suasive and unimpressive as arguments from analogy 
usually prove. And even were they immensely more 
striking than they are they would do nothing toward 
overcoming the essential impossibility involved in 
the materialistic position. The hopelessness of the 
undertaking is seen even by materialists themselves, 
— that is, by those who adhere to what I have called 
the second form of Materialism. In Professor War- 
ren's words, "If Professor Montague believes that 
potential energy is another name for consciousness — 
that the two are identical — his assumption seems like 
identifying visual surface with the mass which we 
lift." 2 

The identification of consciousness with energy and 
the denial of the efficiency of consciousness are the 
two horns of a dilemma which has in the past regu- 



1 Op. cit., pp. 131-32; "Are Mental Processes in Space?" pp. 27-28. 

2 "The Mental and the Physical," Psy. Rev., XXI, p. 83. 



36 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

larly proved fatal for Materialism. Either one may 
be avoided but not both. The two defenders of the 
New Materialism whom we have thus far considered 
chose different horns to be avoided. Each carefully 
evaded one of the horns, each deliberately took his 
chance with the other, and each, as I have tried to 
show, came to grief. The third and last advocate of 
the old faith whose position we shall examine is more 
wary than his colleagues. He knows the dangerous 
nature of both horns of the dilemma and means to be 
transfixed by neither. In two articles and in chap- 
ters of three books x Professor Sellars has sought to 
expound a view which (though indeed he does not 
himself explicitly call it Materialism) is, in its de- 
fense of Naturalism, essentially materialistic ; and yet 
at the same time he insists that consciousness is 
neither to be identified with matter nor with brain 
energy 2 nor to be robbed of its efficiency. "Con- 
sciousness is not extended after the manner of a 
physical thing for the very simple reason that it is 
not a physical thing." 3 "It is nonsense to say that 

1 "Critical Realism," 1916 (Chapter IX); "The Essentials of 
Philosophy," 1917 (Chapter XXII) ; "An Approach to the Mind 
Body Problem," Phil. Rev. for March, 1918; "Evolutionary Nat- 
uralism and the Mind Body Problem," Monist for October, 1920; 
"Evolutionary Naturalism," 1922 (Chapter XIV). 

2 "Critical Realism," 223-24. 

3 Ibid., 244. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 37 

the motion of atoms is consciousness." * The func- 
tion of consciousness "is to aid in the bringing to- 
gether of the parts [of a neural system] into a new 
integration by the cues it affords. Literally it assists 
the brain to solve problems." 2 "In deliberation we 
have a conscious process of survey, selection and com- 
bination. Ideas are led to their consequences and 
judged by them. And our decision certainly takes 
the form of a plan which guides our behavior and 
without which our actions would be quite different." 3 

Professor Sellars believes that his doctrine is able 
to avoid the two great difficulties of the older Ma- 
terialism (which we have been discussing in this lec- 
ture) and yet to maintain a strict Naturalism; and 
that it can do this by means of two advances which 
thought has made in our century. One of these is a 
more adequate epistemology than was possessed by 
former defenders of Materialism, the other a new 
view of the nature of matter and its varied "levels." 

Critical Realism, in contrast both to Naive Realism, 
to Neo-realism, and to Idealism, identifies conscious- 



1 "Essentials," 260. 

2 "Approach to the Mind Body Problem," 158. See also 157 and 
159. 

3 "Evolutionary Naturalism," 312. See also 311 and 313. Cf. also 
"Critical Realism," 238, 249-50; "Evolutionary Naturalism" in the 
Monist, 590, 



38 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ness with the whole field of the individual's experi- 
ence and at the same time insists upon the reality and 
the knowability of the physical. Consciousness is 
that which can be immediately experienced — or 
rather it is immediate experience; whereas the physi- 
cal world is never directly intuited (as Naive Realism 
believes) and yet (contrary to the assertion of Ideal- 
ism) it can be indirectly known. 1 This physical 
world, moreover, modern science seems to show, is 
not organized on simply one plan, nor subject to 
merely one set of laws. "If evolution is more than 
appearance, it surely implies a change in the mode of 
activity of parts of nature." 2 "It is no longer possi- 
ble for a fair critic to identify Naturalism with the 
mechanical view of the world." 3 

The new and true Naturalism is therefore Evolu- 
tionary Naturalism. It must be remembered, how- 
ever, that it is the material world that is evolving, 
and that the new laws of action on its higher levels 
are still the laws of the material world, nor can it be 
admitted by the defender of Evolutionary Naturalism 



^'Critical Realism," 215-217, 247; "Approach," 155-56; "Evolu- 
tionary Naturalism," 294-95, 303-05, 307, 310. 

2 "Critical Realism," 235. 

3 "Evolutionary Naturalism," 19. See also 292, 297, 302, all of 
Chapter I ; in fact the whole volume is devoted to this contention. 
See also "Approach," 159. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 39 

that in any of these levels anything independent of 
the physical interferes with the regular physical ac- 
tivities. Anything like interaction between con- 
sciousness and the brain is strongly repudiated. The 
physical world is a closed system." The laws of ac- 
tion of the lower material levels, moreover, are not 
abrogated. The new categories which apply to the 
new levels are continuous with the old ones and must 
not conflict with them. 2 The old laws must be 
obeyed, the new ones being apparently additive 
merely. 

The question must of course immediately present 
itself to every reader: Can this kind of modified Nat- 
uralism be really compatible with the efficiency of 
consciousness? Professor Sellars thinks that it can 
be if the true relation of consciousness to the brain 
be understood. "My thesis is that the living organ- 
ism, when properly and adequately conceived, in- 
cludes consciousness." 3 "When the cortex functions, 
consciousness forms part of the nature of the 
brain." 4 The brain has at least two "variants," one 
of them neural activity, the other conscious content. 

1 "Evolutionary Naturalism," 314. 

2 "Approach," 154. 
*Ibid., 152. 

4 "Critical Realism," 247. See also 228-29, 2 3 1 \ "Evolutionary 
Naturalism," 298, 308; "Essentials," 264-65. 



40 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

Consciousness is thus a "variant" of the brain. 1 "Psy- 
chical entities are not substances, but rather peculiar 
characteristics of neural wholes and inseparable from 
them." 2 "Consciousness is the brain become con- 
scious." 3 

This identification of consciousness with the brain 
does not, in Professor Sellars' opinion, involve the 
logical inconsistencies of the older Materialism; for 
"we do not mean that the same categories are appli- 
cable to the physical as known by the physical sci- 
ences and to consciousness." "As classes thought 
about by scientists, the physical and the psychical 
have contradictory attributes. This must not be con- 
fused with the question whether the physical as an 
existent can absorb consciousness." 4 In other words, 
Professor Sellars does not identify consciousness as 
such with brain substance or brain activity as such; 
but both consciousness and brain activity are vari- 
ants of one organism. He simply means that "con- 
sciousness is not alien to the physical." 5 The brain 
thinks. 

1 "When we call it a variant of the brain we imply that it is 
inseparable from the brain and penetrates it with right as a part 
of the reality of the brain." "Critical Realism," 244. 

2 "Evolutionary Naturalism," 316 and 317. 

3 "Critical Realism," 245. 
*Ibid., 228, 229. 

5 Ibid., Chapter IX. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 41 

We may be able to go all this way with Professor 
Sellars and still be unable to see any real answer to 
the question how Naturalism is to be made compati- 
ble with the efficiency of consciousness. Consciousness 
and the neural activity which controls our muscles 
and our conduct may well be two "variants" of the 
organism; but if this be proposed as an answer to 
our question, the old difficulty breaks out again in 
the further question, What is the relation of these 
two " variants" to each other? The answer proposed 
by Parallelism, that they are two parallel aspects of 
one reality and that they run along with no mutual 
influence, Professor Sellars explicitly and repeatedly 
rejects; * and he is, naturally, even more determined 
in his opposition to Interaction. 2 To be sure, "con- 
sciousness literally assists the brain to meet new situ- 
ations" 3 yet consciousness and the brain never inter- 
act. Interaction would imply, as Professor Sellars 
points out, some degree of independence on the part 
of consciousness, at least while it lasts; and such 
independence and interaction would be incompatible 
with Naturalism. It is, indeed, hard to see how the 

1 ''Critical Realism," 246; "Essentials," 257-58; "Approach," 157; 
"Evolutionary Naturalism," 289-95. 

2 "Essentials," 254-57; Monist, 569-75; "Evolutionary Natural- 
ism," 287-94. 

3 "Evolutionary Naturalism," 313. 



42 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

denial of Interaction can be compatible with the view 
that consciousness "literally assists the brain" and 
"guides behavior" so that without it "our actions 
would be quite different." One way out of the dif- 
ficulty — and I confess the only one I can think of — 
is the way taken by Professor Montague, — namely 
that of restoring efficacy to consciousness by making 
it a form of neural energy. Something like this view 
indeed Professor Sellars seems often to take. "Con- 
sciousness is existentially present to that part of the 
cortex which is functioning, and the brain's space is 
its space." * That is, it is in the brain, as light is in 
the diamond or electricity in the wire. "There is no 
valid reason to deny that consciousness is an ex- 
tended manifold. It arises in and is effective in the 
physical world. Its unity is that of the integrative 
activity of the brain which it helps to direct. Hence 
it is as extended as the brain is." 2 That Professor 
Sellars at times seeks to solve the difficulty of the 
efficiency of consciousness through the identification 
of consciousness with the activity of the brain — an 
identification which at other times he emphatically 
denies — is made more evident through his explicit 

1 "Critical Realism," 244. 

2 Ibid., 247. Cf. also 245-49. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 43 

identification of the mind with the organization of the 
brain 1 and his occasional implicit identification of 
conscious processes with mental processes. Intelli- 
gent behavior is to be accounted for by nervous proc- 
esses, 2 since mind is a physical category. "Our view 
takes the sensori-motor process as a unit and holds 
that cortical integration of which consciousness is an 
element is always genetically continuous with a 
motor pattern of the brain. In other words, cortical 
integrations arise in one system with motor tracts." 3 
"Psychical entities are peculiar characteristics of 
neural wholes and inseparable from them. ... As 
soon as they are conceived as more than contents, as 
more than they themselves reveal, as soon as they 
are given by themselves power to do things, they be- 
come to the deceived thinker non-physical and alien 
to physical reality." 4 "The brain as mind is a more 
or less integrated system of propensities and interests 
which respond to the situation in which the indi- 
vidual is placed. And such interests must not be 
thought of as physiological in any sense that ex- 
cludes discriminative appreciation. They are neu- 

1 "Critical Realism," 252-53. "Evolutionary Naturalism," 300-02, 
3I5-I6. 

2 "Evolutionary Naturalism," 300. 

3 Ibid., 314. 
*Ibid. t 317. 



44 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

rological systems whose urgencies are inclusive of 
mental contents. Consciousness must be connected 
psychophysically with neural processes of some reach. 
Attention itself can be understood only as a forward 
movement or passage in which the cerebral activity 
makes its path. What we must seek to do is to deepen 
our conception of the brain as at once activity and 
content. It is sensori-motor, ideo-motor; it is a 
stream of tendencies lit up by consciousness. The 
brain is synthetic because it is active. It is a more 
or less unitary process controlled by the neuronic sys- 
tem which is functionally uppermost." 1 

I cannot say I am perfectly sure what these last 
quotations mean. But this at least is plain to me: 
that if they offer a method by which the universality 
of Naturalism can be made compatible with the effi- 
ciency of consciousness, this method consists exactly 
in identifying the psychical with the physical. If 
this identification is not intended by Professor Sellars 
I cannot understand either how he proposes to save 
the efficiency of consciousness or what it is he means 
by interpreting propensities, interests, discriminative 
appreciation and attention as neurological systems or 
forward movements of cerebral activity. 

1 "Evolutionary Naturalism," 315-16. 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 45 

In other words, I cannot see that Professor Sellars 
has done anything to help Materialism out of its old 
dilemma of being forced either to identify conscious- 
ness with the brain or to deny its efficacy. Neither 
of the advances he has made over his predecessors 
of a former generation has really made the diffi- 
culty any less real. Critical Realism is perhaps com- 
patible with Materialism; but it is at least equally 
compatible with Interaction. Nor does the existence 
of "higher levels" of matter in the organic world give 
any real assistance. For even on these higher levels, 
we are told, nothing can conflict with the mechanical 
1 aws ; and the new and higher laws of these levels are 
also, of course, still physical. Neither the old laws nor 
the new, therefore, can be interfered with or modified 
by consciousness (unless consciousness itself be 
physical) without wrecking Naturalism and the whole 
materialistic scheme quite as disastrously as Inter- 
action ever threatened to do. Professor Sellars does 
not seem to realize that the ultimate difficulty of Ma- 
terialism lies not in the kind of physical laws which it 
sets in absolute control of mind and of human be- 
havior, but in the setting any physical laws in abso- 
lute control. Let matter be as highly evolved as you 
like, if its processes completely determine action, the 



46 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

efficiency of consciousness goes by the board. To 
seek to dodge this uncomfortable fact by glowing ac- 
counts of the subtlety and fineness of modern matter 
on its "higher levels" is like trying to console the con- 
demned criminal on his way to the gallows by as- 
suring him that the rope with which he is to be hung 
is not made of common hemp but of the finest and 
strongest silk. And any doctrine that denies the ef- 
ficiency of consciousness must face all the serious 
and, I believe, fatal consequences which proved so 
disastrous to the older Materialism. 

Other writers than those considered in this lecture 
might, of course, be added to the list of neo-material- 
ists. But the three we have examined are typical in 
the sense that between them they seem to exhaust the 
possibilities. Professor Warren avoids the absurdity 
of identifying consciousness with brain but does so 
only by making consciousness inefficient and thereby 
committing himself to consequences that seem equally 
difficult of acceptance. Professor Montague clings 
to the efficiency of consciousness but only at the cost 
of calling consciousness a form of neural energy. 
Professor Sellars is unwilling to commit himself to 
either of these difficulties; and ends by falling a vic- 
tim to both. My conclusion can only be that the 



THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM 47 

New Materialism has failed to bring forth a single 
consideration that makes the materialistic hypothesis 
really easier of acceptance than it was at the time 
when nearly every thinker gave it up, twenty years 
ago. 



LECTURE II 

PARALLELISM 

In the preceding lecture we considered the general 
nature of the mind-body problem and the material- 
istic solution of it. We saw the reasons — and very 
conclusive ones indeed they seemed — which led al- 
most all thinkers toward the close of the Nineteenth 
Century to abandon Materialism; and we considered 
also the attempt by some of our contemporaries to 
resuscitate it. The new arguments, we saw, were 
quite helpless before the old difficulties, and we were, 
therefore, forced to conclude that Materialism, 
whether old or new, was an altogether untenable and 
hopeless position. The result of the lecture thus 
seemed purely negative. Yet it was not wholly so. 
For it was a considerable step in the process of elim- 
ination by which we may well hope to reach in the 
end a positive solution. It is, therefore, with re- 
newed courage that we turn to the much more prom- 
ising theory of Parallelism. 

In turning from Materialism to Parallelism we are 
in fact following the example of most Nineteenth 

48 



PARALLELISM 49 

Century materialists. For it was in Parallelism that 
nearly all of them took refuge when the difficulties 
of their former doctrine were fully revealed; and 
their choice of refuge was well made. For Parallel- 
ism seems to possess all the naturalistic advantages 
of Materialism with none of its difficulties. Unlike 
both Materialism and Interaction, it is no naive and 
primitive doctrine, but a careful, artistic, and self^ 
conscious effort to avoid the difficulties which proved 
so serious to its rivals. With these difficulties in 
mind it has aimed chiefly at three things. The first » 
of these is the application of the mechanical laws of 
Naturalism to all physical processes, those of the hu- 
man brain included. Every physical event, the be- 
havior of men as well as the falling of stones, must 
be entirely explicable on purely physical principles; 
and the law of the conservation of energy must be 
nowhere infringed. This is the primary motive of 
Parallelism and by strict adherence to it the difficul- 
ties of Interaction are clearly avoided. But of al- 
most equal importance to the parallelist (if we may 
believe his protestations) is his second aim, namely v 
to retain the independence of consciousness within its 
own realm and thereby to avoid the difficulties of 
Materialism. To apply mechanical laws to all human 



SO MATTER AND SPIRIT 

behavior and yet to retain belief in the independence 
of consciousness, of course, seems at first sight a dif- 
ficult feat; but the parallelist is persuaded he can 
achieve it by avoiding, finally, a pitfall into which 
both the interactionist and the materialist fell, — 
namely the belief in causal action between two such 
diverse entities as mind and body. Causal action, 
says the parallelist, may be found in the physical 
stream, or in the psychical stream, or in both, but 
never crossing from one to the other. Bodily events 
and mental events flow parallel to each other in co- 
ordinate series, but without mutual influence. But 
though there is no interchange of causal activity be- 
tween the two streams there is a strict concomitance. 
For every mental state there is a corresponding bodily 
state and vice versa; and this one-to-one correspond- 
ence holds not only of the mental and bodily states 
as wholes but also of their parts — as indeed it obvi- 
ously must if the doctrine is to be self-consistent. 

Such is the theory of Parallelism in general. So 
much all its adherents, as I understand them, main- 
tain. But the theory is a very elaborate and subtle 
one, and, as might be expected, it has several sub- 
types or variations. Conceivably there are at 
least five possible ways in which mind and body 



PARALLELISM 51 

might be represented as running parallel to each other 
without causal relation. 1 The first of these is frankly 
dualistic, while the four others have more or less of 
a monistic slant. Dualistic Parallelism simply states 
the parallelist view (as I have attempted to do above) 
without explanation. But this bald form of the 
doctrine need not detain us, inasmuch as no one, so 
far as I know, has ever defended it. It has no real 
adherents for obvious reasons. If mind and body be 
regarded as two separate kinds of being, neither of 
them in any way dominating or influencing the other, 
their unfailing concomitance would be one of the 
most astonishing facts in the universe — an unbroken 
succession of unaccountable coincidences which could 
at best be attributed only to some sort of miraculous 
agency or Pre-established Harmony. For a some- 
what similar reason we may dismiss, as almost all 
parallelists have done, a second possible form of the 
doctrine, which would make the physical series funda- 
mental, and the psychical merely an epiphenomenon. 
Although this view seems to be upheld by both Mun- 
sterberg and Ziehen, it is plainly open either to the 
difficulties of Dualistic Parallelism just considered or 
to the equally serious difficulties of Materialism. 

1 See the diagram on page 7. 



52 mattp:r and spirit 

There remain for our consideration the two great 
forms of Parallelism to one or the other of which 
practically all the adherents of the school belong. 
These are the so-called Double Aspect View, in its 
two subordinate types, and Idealistic Parallelism. 

The Double Aspect View depicts the mental and 
the bodily series as equally real, yet does not, like 
mere Dualistic Parallelism, leave us with a series of 
unexplained coincidences on our hands, but shows us 
why the two series are always parallel. This reason 
is to be found in the hypothesis that mind and body 
are not independent and substantive things but are 
merely two aspects of the same Reality. The com- 
monest illustration is that of the curved line, which 
on one side is convex, on the other concave. Sup- 
pose such a line with many curvings and twistings; 
the succession of concavities and convexities on one 
side would correspond exactly to the convexities and 
concavities on the other, and yet without any inter- 
change of causal activity between them. Many other 
illustrations have been suggested, one of the most 
recent being that of Professor Warren — the relation, 
namely, between the mass and the surface of a physi- 
cal object. These two vary concomitantly, yet 
neither is the cause of the other. 



PARALLELISM S3 

Unfortunately for my exposition and your under- 
standing, there are two forms of this doctrine; and 
it is not always easy in reading the expositions of its 
adherents to know which is the one intended. That 
both mind and body are merely aspects of something 
else is strenuously maintained, but just what they 
are aspects of is not always clear. A careful read- 
ing, however, discloses two distinct suggestions. 
Sometimes it is maintained that mind and body are 
aspects of each other; sometimes that they are as- 
pects of some known or unknown Tertium Quid. I 
think the first of these doctrines should not detain 
us a great while. If mind and matter are not aspects 
of some third reality they presumably constitute be- 
tween them at any rate the major part of the actual 
universe. If now one of these two forms of reality is 
nothing but an aspect of the other, and if the other 
likewise is nothing but an aspect of the one, our uni- 
verse shrinks into two mere appearances which are 
not the appearances of anything and do not appear 
to any one. We are presented merely with two shad- ^ 
ows, each the shadow of the other. It is hard to take 
such a suggestion seriously; and in reading grave 
expositions of this view one feels transported into 
the Wonderland where Alice had her remarkable ad- 



54 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ventures, and one seems to see the smile of the 
Cheshire Cat still hanging on in the sky, long after 
the cat itself has completely dissolved into thin air. 
If we are to accept the Double Aspect View, then 
plainly we must assert that mind and body are as- 
pects of some third thing, the true reality back of the 
two diverse appearances. The proposition seems in 
many ways exceedingly attractive. Questions, how- 
ever, throng upon one the moment one seeks to be 
clear about the real meaning intended. How shall 
one construe this Tertium Quid which by hypothesis 
is neither mental nor physical? If it be really neither 
of these can we know anything about it? And if it 
be an Unknowable, how can we get from it any real 
explanation? We have constructed it only for the 
sake of explaining by its aid certain facts of our life; 
but how can we hope to explain the known by re- 
course to the Unknowable — "that refuge of igno- 
rance"? Nor can it be said that the illustrations pro- 
posed really throw any light whatever on our prob- 
lem. We can see very well how the convex and con- 
cave sides of a line parallel and must parallel each 
other. But we see this because convexities and con- 
cavities are both curves — both the same sort of thing 
— and because, knowing what a line is we see how 



PARALLELISM 55 

its two sides follow from its nature. But can it be 
seriously maintained that this in the least helps us 
to see how two things admittedly so diverse as mind 
and body can be two sides of a Something-I-know- 
not-what? The best that can be said for the proposi- 
tion is that inasmuch as we know nothing of the Un- 
knowable we know not what aspects it may have. 
But surely such an assertion is far from illuminating ; 
and instead of being a positive theory concerning 
empirically known facts it is merely a confession of 
ignorance about an arbitrarily assumed entity so con- 
structed that no one ever could know it. 

The curved line with convex and concave sides, 
then, throws little light on our problem. Nor can it 
be said that the other illustrations of things with two 
aspects, suggested by various writers, are any more 
helpful. Hoffding's example of the idea that is ex- 
pressed by different words in different languages; 
Lasswitz's suggestion of the sum of borrowed money 
which for one person is an asset, for the other a debt; 
Fechner's later illustration of the solar system which 
from the earth appears to move in Ptolemaic fash- 
ion, from the sun in Copernican — these proposals in 
so far as they are helpful at all are merely aids to the 
imagination, not to thought; in fact they darken 



56 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

thought by obscuring the real situation and persuad- 
ing us to be satisfied with a verbal solution and a 
visual image. Possibly Professor Warren's compari- 
son already referred to — the mass and the surface of 
a material object — may have some advantages over 
its predecessors; but if so they are not sufficient to 
make the illustration really helpful — as a moment's 
careful examination will make plain. Mass and sur- 
face are the diverse ways in which an identical physi- 
cal object — perhaps in itself a center of force — af- 
fects respectively the muscular and the visual senses. 
If this is to be taken as a serious illustration of the 
way in which mind and matter may be regarded as 
two aspects of the same thing, we may suppose that 
the Tertium Quid — whether center of force, Un- 
knowable, or what-not — affects two different senses 
and two different brain centers in two different ways, 
and that mind and matter are just these ways. Mat- 
ter then is to be conceived as the way in which the 
Tertium Quid affects certain sense organs and 
brain centers. But what are these organs and cen- 
ters? Of course they too are matter. Thus we have 
defined matter as the effect which something has 
upon matter. Such a view is patently unstatable — 
the thing defined is presupposed in the definition. 



PARALLELISM 57 

There is only one other way in which Professor War- 
ren's illustration can be applied to our problem- — 
only one other way, in fact, so far as I can see, in 
which the Double Aspect Theory can be given any 
meaning at all. This is obviously to say that mind 
and matter are the two ways in which the Tertium 
Quid appears. But the question at once asks itself: 
"Appears" to whom? If you define a thing as an ap- 
pearance you necessarily presuppose some one to 
whom it appears. An appearance must be an appear- 
ance in or to some conscious being. What then is 
this conscious being? What is this consciousness to 
which consciousness appears? . . . Again we have 
included within our definition the thing to be de- 
fined. We have been able to put meaning into our 
Double Aspect Theory only by presupposing the very 
things which we seek to explain. We shall, I think, 
agree that a theory which cannot even be definitely 
formulated need detain us no longer. 

Of the list of possible answers to the mind-body 
problem with which we started there remains but one 
unexamined. For Idealistic Parallelism is identical 
with the fourth general type of theory to which refer- 
ence was made in the first lecture — that, namely, ac- 
cording to which mind alone is efficient while body 



58 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

is merely the resultant or appearance of it. We 
start our consideration of it, therefore, very favorably 
inclined in advance. When we come to closer terms 
with it, moreover, we find it in possession of one very 
obvious and weighty advantage over all its rivals. 
It is able, namely, to render unto Caesar the things 
that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are 
God's. While giving a perfectly definite account of 
what it means and while making it abundantly clear 
why mental and physical processes run always par- 
allel, it is able to grant mechanical science full swing 
throughout the entire sphere of the physical with no 
least exception, and yet maintain not only that mind 
is independent of body but that mind is the true real- 
ity, and body merely its appearance. 

In stating this great merit of Idealistic Parallelism 
I have, in fact, stated the theory itself. The only 
genuine reality, it maintains, is psychical in its na- 
ture. Body, on the other hand, is merely the phe- 
nomenon of mind, — the way in which one center of 
consciousness appears to another. And not only is 
this true of our brains and our bodies but of the whole 
physical world. For if this kind of Parallelism is to 
be consistent with itself it must be extended to a 
universal Parallelism. It must give a panpsychic in- 



PARALLELISM 59 

terpretation of everything. Though this fact has not 
been fully realized by all adherents of the doctrine 
it can easily be shown to be necessary. For the 
changes that occur within one's experience and which, 
like sensations, cannot be accounted for by preceding 
events within it, must be explained by reference to 
the outer world ; and since all causal influence of the 
physical upon the psychical is precluded by Parallel- 
ism, this outer world must be interpreted as being, 
upon its inner side and in its true nature, of the same 
psychic sort as our own experience — though presum- 
ably of a much lower and simpler order. This pan- 
psychic interpretation is, in fact, gladly and eagerly 
accepted and proclaimed by the more philosophical 
advocates of Idealistic Parallelism. For the physical 
world as a whole being thus interpreted in idealistic 
fashion, the values of the spirit appear at length safe. 
Materialism is forever overcome. Yet, as Paulsen 
points out, it is overcome "not in the sense of being 
altogether false and groundless, for it surely is not 
that. Its demand that everything that exists be ex- 
plained physically is perfectly well founded and this 
demand Parallelism fully satisfies. The physicist 
must still assume the universe to be a physical nexus 
embracing the whole of reality. Materialism, how- 



60 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ever, is vanquished in so far as it now appears to be 
a one-sided view of existence that can and must be 
supplemented. . . . The corporeal world is at bottom 
but an accidental concept, an inadequate representa- 
tion of existence in our sensibility." * 

Thus the age-long conflict between the demands of 
natural science and the needs of the spirit seems at 
length ended by a peace that is fully satisfying and 
honorable to both sides. The philosophical defender 
of the concept of causality is shown to be justified in 
his contention that between two such diverse entities 
as mind and matter are commonly depicted as being, 
there can be no interchange of causal influence. The 
natural scientist is allowed to stride through the whole 
of the physical universe explaining every minutest 
event within it on purely mechanistic principles. The 
law of the conservation of energy is nowhere ques- 
tioned. No private domain is hedged off, even within 
man's brain, in which the laws of physical science 
are refused absolute dominion. No interference is al- 
lowed with them even by the human will. And yet 
the whole of this complete, mechanistic physical world 
is shown to be merely the outer side, the phenomenal 
appearance, of the true reality within— a reality 

i "Introduction to Philosophy," English Translation, pp. no, in. 



PARALLELISM 61 

which in itself is not physical at all. Thus the truth 
of matter is seen to be spirit. 

So much for the theory in general. So important 
and promising a doctrine, however, deserves further 
analysis. And first of all we must note once more 
the fairly obvious fact that Idealistic Parallelism is 
and means to be Parallelism. Let me quote at some 
length an expository passage from one of its most 
prominent proponents, the late Professor Paulsen. 
"The physical processes in the brain form a closed 
causal nexus. There is no member [of it] that is not 
physical in its nature. One would see as little of 
psychical processes, of ideas and thoughts [in the 
brain] as in the movement of a mill. A man crosses 
the street. Suddenly his name is called; he turns 
around and walks toward the person who called him. 
The omniscient physiologist would explain the whole 
process in a purely mechanical way. He would show 
how the physical effect of the sound-waves upon the 
organ of hearing excited a definite nervous process in 
the auditory nerve, how this process was conducted 
to the central organ, how it released certain physical 
processes there which finally led to the innervation of 
certain groups of motor nerves, the ultimate result of 
which was the turning and movement of the body in 



62 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

the direction of the sound-waves. All these occur- 
rences together combine into an unbroken chain of 
physical processes. Alongside of this, another proc- 
ess occurred of which the physiologist as such sees 
nothing or needs to know nothing but with which, 
however, he is acquainted as a thinking being who 
interprets his percepts: there are auditory sensations 
which aroused ideas and feelings. The person called 
heard his name, he turned around in order to see 
who had called him, and why he was addressed; he 
perceived an old acquaintance and went to greet him. 
These occurrences accompany the physical series 
without interfering with it; perception and pres- 
entation are not members of the physical causal 



• 55 1 

series. 



The physical and chemical laws are thus nowhere 
interfered with, not even in human purposeful activ- 
ity. The absolute universality of mechanical law is 
preserved. That is the First and Great Command- 
ment of Parallelism. And the Second is like unto it. 
Physical processes never interfere with psychical 
processes. The two series simply accompany each 
other. So much for the parallelist side of Idealistic 
Parallelism. Now for the idealist side. The physical 

1 "Introduction to Philosophy," English Translation, p. 84. 



PARALLELISM 63 

and psychical series always and invariably and ex- 
actly accompany each other because the physical is 
merely the appearance of the psychical. The facts 
of sense-perception as well as the whole line of argu- 
ment emanating from Berkeley and his school show 
conclusively that physical objects are not in them- 
selves what they appear to be. Certainly their color, 
taste, temperature, and possibly also their spatial 
characters they get from the peculiarities of our sense- 
perception. Hence, argue the idealists, they cannot 
be in themselves identical with their appearance in 
our sensations. How then shall we construe the inner 
nature of physical reality? Let us, they answer, try to 
unlock this mystery by the only key that we possess. 
Only in self-knowledge, only in the experience of our 
own mental states do we get at reality directly, — 
reality in itself and not mere appearance. This in 
fact is what we do in interpreting each other. So 
far as your perception is concerned, I am to you but 
a body, a collection of matter. But the real self of 
me you interpret on the analogy of your own mental 
states. Why not use the same method in interpreting 
the rest of the material world? It is, at any rate, by 
considerations of this sort that the panpsychist 
reaches his conclusion. Matter everywhere is merely 



64 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

the appearance of mind; it is merely the effect — 
actual or possible — produced by various psychic cen- 
ters upon the sensibilities of various perceivers. 
This general idealistic view being accepted, it is easy 
to see how Parallelism may naturally result. 

But we must be still more detailed in our analysis. 
Every portion of matter in the world is the appear- 
ance, or the possible appearance, of a psychic state; 
and every psychic state appears or may appear to 
some perceiver as a material object. The second 
half of this proposition does not follow necessarily 
from panpsychism, but it is the view held by all ideal- 
istic parallelists. What then is the material appear- 
ance of your consciousness and mine — the conscious- 
ness with which the mind-body problem is primarily 
concerned? Plainly it is not our hands and feet, for 
these may be cut off and our consciousness continue 
what it was before. Hands and feet, to be sure, 
and every cell of the body, like other physical objects, 
must, on panpsychic principles, be the appearance of 
psychic centers, but these presumably are centers of 
lower degrees of development than the personal con- 
sciousness. Where, then, shall we look for the ma- 
terial side, so to speak, of the personal consciousness? 
Careful parallelists, such as Professor Strong, agree 



PARALLELISM 65 

in maintaining that this is to be found in the cortex 
of the cerebrum. Since this is recognized by all 
physiologists as the real and only direct correlate of 
consciousness, the only part of the body whose activi- 
ties can conceivably be regarded as parallel to the 
activities of the mind, Strong's conclusion and that of 
the great majority of parallelists is unavoidable. The 
cortex is the appearance, the phenomenon, of the per- 
sonal consciousness. This is a most important and 
fundamental part of the doctrine in question. That 
is to say, the cortex is the effect which the personal 
consciousness makes or the possible effect that it 
might make, upon other perceivers. The personal 
consciousness, in its turn, is the inner reality of the 
cortex; it is that which appears (or which would 
under suitable conditions appear) to the eye of the 
observer as a collection of gray neural matter. If 
the personal consciousness has any physical correlate 
or appearance it is this ; and since on parallelist prin- 
ciples it must have a physical correlate or appear- 
ance, this it must be. Parallelism, therefore, plainly 
stands or falls with this identification of the personal 
consciousness with the cortex. If we can prove it 
true we shall have refuted all opposing theories, — 
although, of course, if this identification should turn 



66 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

out to be false, Idealistic Parallelism would be put in 
a serious situation. 

Is it possible to find a test case that will settle this 
crucial question of fact? Fortunately it is. An 
actual experiment may be tried by which the ques- 
tion may be definitely settled whether or not the 
cortex is the appearance of the personal conscious- 
ness. For there is one situation in which the personal 
consciousness vanishes and hence ceases to appear 
altogether. I refer, of course, to death. Whatever 
else death may be, and whatever theories we may 
hold about it, we all agree that death is either the 
complete cessation of the personal consciousness or 
at least the severance of it from all relation to the 
body. The lower cells of the body continue in exist- 
ence, according to Idealistic Parallelism, because the 
lower conscious centers, of which they are the appear- 
ance, continue to be conscious. But the personal con- 
sciousness has disappeared. It has ceased to have 
any "appearance. " It has quite vanished. Hence, 
as good parallelists, on opening up the skull of the 
dead man we shall know what to expect. If our 
theory is true we shall indeed find the white matter 
of the brain intact, but there will be no gray matter, 
no cortex. 



PARALLELISM 67 

I need not tell you that, as good parallelists, we 
shall be disappointed. We open up the skull and 
there before us is the gray cortex, appearing, as un- 
mistakably as anything can, just as if the personal 
consciousness of which it is merely the appearance 
had not disappeared. What shall we make of this 
situation? Certainly it is an odd fact that almost 
the only time when the cortex is ever actually seen is 
just the time when according to our theory it ought 
to have disappeared altogether ! 

However humbled we may feel as parallelists at 
the result of our experiment, we shall as searchers for 
the truth be thankful that after so much theorizing 
on our problem we have at any rate come upon one 
solid, incontrovertible fact. Whatever else may be 
true of their interrelation, we know that the cortex is 
not the appearance of the mind. Can Idealistic Par- 
allelism be reconstructed so as to make room for this 
fact? Two alternatives are open to us. We might, 
in the first place, while retaining our Panpsychism, 
change our interpretation of it so as to assert that 
the psychical centers back of the cortex are, like 
those back of the other parts of the body, centers of 
lower grade than our personal consciousness, and that 
this is why the cortex continues to appear after the 



68 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

personal consciousness has vanished. But if we take 
this view, there will be no portion of the brain or 
body left for the personal consciousness to parallel, 
nor any physical series to be its appearance. The 
personal consciousness would thus be without physi- 
cal correlate or phenomenon. Such a view might be 
defensible, but it would not be Parallelism. For thus 
the personal consciousness, whose relation to the body 
Parallelism is seeking to explain, would be left unex- 
plained. The second alternative would be to deny 
the idealistic view altogether and to interpret the 
brain in frankly realistic fashion. This would, of 
course, be to abandon Idealistic Parallelism, but the 
parallelistic part of the doctrine might still be saved. 
Yet it must be noted that if we abandon the idealistic 
interpretation of the cortex as the appearance of the 
mind we are thrown back on one of the two inde- 
fensible forms of Parallelism which we examined and 
were forced to reject in the first part of this lecture. 
We have no more reason than we had then to say 
that cortex and mind are two aspects of the same 
thing; nor can we present the two series as simply 
parallel, in the fashion of Dualistic Parallelism, with- 
out the same impossible appeal to an unthinkable 
succession of unaccountable coincidences. 



PARALLELISM 69 

I can think of no way in which Idealistic Parallel- 
ism can get out of the difficulties which face it as soon 
as one grasps the unquestionable fact that the cortex 
is certainly not the appearance of the mind. Yet, 
inasmuch as the theory has been such a favorite 
among psychologists it may be well to submit it to 
still further analysis. For the moment, then, let us 
suppose that in some unimaginable fashion the ideal- 
istic parallelist can retain his theory (in spite of the 
facts) that brain events are the appearance of mind 
events. It is interesting to note that if this be the 
case, the two series are not contemporaneous but 
successive. The physical event must always follow 
the psychical event with which it is correlated. Pro- 
fessor Strong, to be sure, in the concluding chapter of 
"Why the Mind Has a Body" denies this; but he 
does so only by surrendering for the moment his en- 
tire idealistic theory and going over (temporarily) to 
the Double Aspect or Identity Theory, which he had 
vigorously repudiated a few pages before. The par- 
allelist, indeed, is fortunate in possessing three or 
four different theories, each of which is, to be sure, 
inconsistent with the others, but all of which pass 
under the same general name of Parallelism; so when 
he gets into difficulties by pursuing one type of Par- 



70 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

allelism he can speedily take refuge in another till 
these calamities be overpast. If we insist upon think- 
ing straight, however, it is easy to keep the various 
Parallelisms separate; and it is perfectly plain that if 
we are to call the brain the appearance of the mind, 
that is, the actual or possible effect of the psychical 
series upon the sensibility of some other perceiver, 
then a minute portion of time will be required for this 
process of appearance or perception to take place; 
and hence the physical event will be subsequent to the 
psychical event. This, of course, is not inconsistent 
with Parallelism though it makes it look a bit tipsy. 
But a much more interesting consideration follows as 
a corollary from these conclusions. The physical 
event, namely, is not only subsequent to the psychical 
event but it must be regarded as caused by the psy- 
chical event. The parallelist cannot get around this. 
If the word appearance means anything for him it 
means that something appears to some one; that is, 
that it produces an effect in some one's sensibility, in 
some one's consciousness. Physiological psychology 
describes this perceptual process in causal terms, and 
so far as I am aware, no parallelist questions the de- 
scription. He translates it, of course, into psychical 
terms, but this means that he merely puts physical 



PARALLELISM 71 

causation back into psychical causation. That is to 
say, one psychical center affects another psychical 
center in such a fashion that the second experiences 
a certain sensation. A series of psychical events 
cause a series of percepts. The parallelist can hardly 
deny this causal influence in the production of the 
percept or physical appearance; for to do so would 
be to return to mere Dualistic Parallelism with its 
inexplicable series of miracles. This causal relation, 
however, is not of the physical sort — for physical 
causation is, of course, only appearance. The only 
true causality, as distinct from appearance, is that 
found within each of the psychical series, and between 
one psychical series and another. In the latter case, 
this psychical causation would appear to be a kind 
of telepathy — an immediate influence of one con- 
scious center upon another without the intervention 
of anything physical. Within the physical series, on 
the other hand, there is no causal influence or activity 
whatever. Each link in the chain of the physical ap- 
pearance is pulled along not by the preceding physical 
link but by the preceding psychical link. Thus the 
idealistic parallelists misstate the matter when they 
say that we have two independent series which run 
off parallel with each other. It is not true (as Paul- 



72 



MATTER AND SPIRIT 



sen maintains) that the psychical occurrences simply 
"accompany the physical series without interfering 
with it." Such a description would hold of Dualistic 
Parallelism and of Double Aspect Parallelism, but 
not of Idealistic Parallelism. The typical parallelist 
scheme which Paulsen thinks he is defending might 
be represented thus: 



-►c 



->b- 



->-c 



Capitals symbolize physical events, while arrows indicate causa- 
tion or productive influence. 



But this scheme , as I have said, applies only to the 
two kinds of Parallelism which we rejected early in 
this lecture and which Paulsen and Strong reject. 
Idealistic Parallelism must be represented thus: 



-^c 



It will be seen that the physical is as completely 
stripped of causal efficiency by this view as the psy- 



PARALLELISM 73 

chical was stripped of it by Materialism. Xo physical 
state, on the hypothesis of Idealistic Parallelism, ever 
causes another physical state, but each is directly 
caused by a psychical state. 

Such a theory seems odd enough in all conscience. 
Yet the oddest part of it remains to be mentioned. 
The panpsychist with no parallelist leanings might 
indeed maintain it simply in the form I have stated; 
but the parallelist invariably goes on and adds the 
further assertion (which to him is fundamental), that 
though the psychical series is the only one that acts, 
the only one with any causal efficacy, it always acts 
in such a way that its appearance — the physical series 
— will invariably unroll in accordance with mechan- 
ical laws. I suppose a parallelist might be conceived 
who would not make this additional demand but 
would be content with the simple panpsychic formula. 
But as a fact I have never heard of such an easily 
contented parallelist and I do not believe there is or 
there ever has been one. The reason for this is plain. 
Parallelism, as we have seen, is a very artificial and 
carefully constructed scheme and the great motive 
in its construction is to find a way in which universal 
mechanism may be maintained. One who had no 
such ax to grind, one who came at the facts with 



74 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

an entirely free mind and sought merely to report 
what he seemed to find, would never think of Paral- 
lelism. This is something which deserves repeating. 
The known facts of brain physiology, taken by them- 
selves and out of their relation to the rest of the 
physical world, would never suggest Parallelism. To 
suppose that Parallelism is based on the empirical 
discoveries of physiological psychology is completely 
to misunderstand the situation. Parallelism is based 
not on facts, but on a theory — on the theory, namely, 
that mechanical laws are universal. It is an attempt 
to devise a way in which this theory may be made 
consistent with the facts of physiological psychology. 
Hence the strained and somewhat fantastic nature 
of the resultant, the odd mixture arising from the 
combination of universal mechanical law with a view 
of the brain which makes it merely an appearance of 
the mind — and usually a non-actual but only possi- 
ble appearance at that. The real events (the psy- 
chical series) must take care, whatever else they do, 
to preserve appearances — to maintain scrupulously 
the scientific regularity of their physical phenomena. 
Suppose now that we have a condition of my brain 
and of the rest of the physical world — condition A 
let us call it — which is such as to necessitate, accord- 



PARALLELISM 75 

ing to mechanical laws, that it be followed by condi- 
tion B. Suppose condition B is such as necessarily 
to let loose certain motor impulses into my muscles 
and bring about action C. Suppose, however, that 
while my brain is in condition A, I decide — for pur- 
poseful, logical, or aesthetic reasons — not to do C 
but to do N. What will happen? Either I can do N, 
and do so and thereby break the mechanical laws ; or 
else I cannot do N, nor even decide to do N. The 
latter view will, of course, be that taken by the par- 
allelist. He will insist that once my brain was in 
condition A the mind state which should accompany 
brain state B was already determined — a mind state, 
namely, that would be a desire to perform the act C. 
Thus it is really the mechanical laws of the appear- 
ance or of the merely possible appearance that deter- 
mine the activity of the real being back of the appear- 
ance. The appearance of the mind — namely the 
brain — has no causal efficacy whatever, not even 
within its own series; throughout the life of almost 
every one of us it never is even a real appearance but 
only a possible one. Yet the mechanical laws of its 
behavior, and not the teleological, rational, aesthetic, 
hedonic relations between ideas and impulses, domi- 
nate every process not only within the physical but 



76 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

also within the psychical series. The action of the 
reality is altogether determined by the laws of its 
merely possible appearance. It is a remarkable case 
of the tail wagging the dog. 

The seriousness of this situation must be realized 
quite irrespective of its incongruity. It involves the 
necessity of really giving up all teleology even in the 
mental life. It means that it is not the consciousness 
of logic and of purpose, nor the laws which intro- 
spective psychology studies, that control the flow of 
our thoughts, the course of our reasonings, and the 
sequence of our actions upon our purposes; not 
psychical laws determine these things but the same 
mechanical laws, never guessed at in introspection, 
which govern the dance of atoms in the chemist's 
retort and the fall of snowflakes in the polar regions. 

The same conclusion forces itself upon us if we 
consider the parallelist view of the nature of mind; 
and what I shall have to say on this topic applies not 
only to the idealistic parallelist but to every form of 
Parallelism. In order that Parallelism may be true 
we must suppose a correspondence between mind and 
brain so complete that not only shall the two parallel 
each other in a general way but that each part or 
section or aspect of the one shall find an equivalent 



PARALLELISM 77 

part, section, or aspect in the other. Corresponding 
to every brain state and brain part there must be a 
mind state and mind part. For back of every appear- 
ance the idealistic parallelist must find a reality that 
appears; and the upholder of the Double Aspect 
Theory must insist that all the details of one aspect 
stand in one-to-one correspondence with the details 
of the other. The reverse is also true; for every state 
of consciousness and every change in it there must be 
a corresponding section or activity of the cortex. 
Otherwise our Parallelism would be broken. 

This doctrine of complete correspondence, unavoid- 
able for the parallelist, determines his view of the 
nature of mind. Brain is a collection of parts, each 
of which is indefinitely divisible into smaller parts; 
hence mind also must be a collection, must be con- 
stituted of parts each susceptible of indefinite fur- 
ther analysis. The seeming unity of mind must be 
explained away, and such things as comparison, ap- 
prehension of likeness and of difference, the sense 
of our own continued identity, the consciousness of 
meaning, must be analyzed into a mere succession of 
simple psychic states. Nor can the parallelist stop 
here. Inasmuch as the brain is divisible into parts 
much smaller than any that can be thought of as cor- 



78 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

responding to even our simplest feelings or sensations, 
both sensations and feelings must be analyzed into 
simpler and simpler parts, parts which indeed are 
still called psychic but which we never experience. 
Thus all thought, feeling, conviction, choice is ex- 
plained by a kind of mental chemistry; and the whole 
human mind and human personality is reduced to a 
collection of presumably homogeneous mind-dust, — 
a mind-dust which, of course, like other dust, acts in 
strict obedience to the universal laws of mechanics. 

Concerning the unity of consciousness in its more 
general sense I shall have something to say in another 
connection. Here I wish to dwell for a moment upon 
the particular aspect of the question raised by the 
Mind-dust Theory. That all our conscious states are 
made up ultimately of minute psychic elements which 
somehow fuse, — a position made popular by the sup- 
port it received from Spencer, Clifford, and Miin- 
sterberg, — seemed to be forever refuted by Professor 
James' famous argument, in Chapter VI of his "Prin- 
ciples of Psychology." The assertion, he tells us, 
that mental units can be compounded with themselves 
so as to produce the conscious states which we know, 
is logically unintelligible; for "it leaves out the es- 
sential feature of all the combinations we actually 



PARALLELISM 79 

know. All the 'combinations' which we actually 
know are effects wrought by the units said to be 
'combined' upon some entity other than themselves. 
Without this feature of a medium or vehicle, the no- 
tion of combination has no sense. ... No possible 
number of entities can sum themselves together. 
Each remains in the sum what it always was; and 
the sum itself exists only for a bystander who hap- 
pens to overlook the units and to apprehend the sum 
as such; or else it exists in the shape of some other 
effect on an entity external to the sum itself. . . . 
Where the elemental units are supposed to be feel- 
ings, the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred 
of them, shuffle them and pack them as close to- 
gether as you can (whatever that may mean) ; still 
each remains the same feeling it always was, shut 
in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the 
other feelings are and mean. There would be a hun- 
dred and first feeling there if when a group or series 
of such feelings were set up a consciousness belong- 
ing to the group as such should emerge. And this 
101st feeling would be a totally new fact. . . . The 
'integration' of a thousand psychic units must be 
either just the units over again, simply rebaptized, 
or else something real, but then other than and addi- 






80 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

tional to those units; if a certain existing fact is 
that of a thousand feelings it cannot at the same 
time be that of one feeling; for the essence of feeling 
is to be felt, and as a psychic existent feels so it must 
be. If the one feeling feels like no one of the thou- 
sand, in what sense can it be said to be the thou- 
sand? " * 

This argument of Professor James, as I was say- 
ing, has for years been regarded pretty generally as 
having given the coup de grace to the Mind-dust 
Theory. Within very recent times, however, the 
whole question has been reopened by Professor 
Strong, who with his usual keen sense for key posi- 
tions, challenges James' central thesis, namely that 
the essence of feeling is to be felt and that as a 
psychic existent feels so it must be. On Professor 
Strong's view, consciousness is to be sharply distin- 
guished from psychic states; introspection is never 
of the present but always of the past and hence in- 
direct; and our psychic states, being thus only indi- 
rectly introspected, need not be what they seem, and 
do not, existentially, possess the unity which has 
commonly been attributed to them. To revert to 
James' figure, there are only the hundred feelings; 

i "Principles of Psychology," Vol. I, pp. 158-63. 



PARALLELISM 81 

the one hundred and first does not exist at all. The 
seeming unity of consciousness is purely specious. It 
is due to the action of attention upon the many 
diverse psychic states. "It is attention then, not con- 
sciousness, that individuates. We should be more 
correct to speak of the 'unity of attention' than of the 
'unity of consciousness.' . . . Attention has the in- 
evitable effect of singling out and isolating the object 
on which it is turned and giving to it unity. But 
this unity is made; it is neither in the object itself nor 
in the psychic state." x 

The conception has been put somewhat more 
clearly by one of Professor Strong's disciples (if so 
I may call him), Dr. Picard. "It is the merit of Dr. 
Strong's work to have shown us that sensation (and 
of course every other seeming fusion as well) has no 
existential unity, but is the result of a certain con- 
venience of treatment of psychic states controlled 
by the limitations of the attention process. The way 
is open, therefore, not to reestablishing the doctrine 
of a fusion of separate sensations in the old sense, 
but to a new conception of fusion based on certain 
features of the mechanism of attention. Under this 
new conception of fusion, the fusion will not be con- 

1 "Origin of Consciousness," 280, 281. 



82 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ceived as of sensations in their own right, but it will 
appear as a fusion in our attitude toward psychic 
states that are in themselves quite unalterably dis- 
tinct. In shoveling coal into a furnace the separate 
coals in the shovel are not fused into one larger coal, 
but it is convenient for me to treat the coals en masse 
as one shovelful while I am performing the operation 
of shoveling. " * 

The strength of this position — what strength it 
has — will plainly depend upon the tenability of Pro- 
fessor Strong's doctrine that we cannot introspect a 
present feeling and that psychic states exist normally 
— or always? — outside of consciousness, and hence 
that the essence of a feeling by no means consists in 
being felt but that on the contrary we can form 
very little notion of what a feeling really is like by 
feeling it. For that remarkable book, "The Origin 
of Consciousness," I have great admiration; yet most 
readers, I believe, will come away from it still un- 
converted from the old and fairly obvious belief that 
"as a psychic existent feels, so it must be." For if 
by a "feeling" we do not mean the way we feel when 
we feel it, it is hard to say what intelligible meaning 
the term can bear. 

1 "The Unity of Consciousness," Jour, of Phil, XVIII, 350. 



PARALLELISM 83 

Even if, however, for the sake of the argument we 
go with Professor Strong and Dr. Picard the whole 
distance so far as the unity of consciousness is con- 
cerned, we do not seem to be so far away from the 
point where Professor James and we started as would 
at first appear. For the seeming solution presented us 
is not a final solution but merely a restatement of the 
problem; we have shifted our difficulty from the 
nature of consciousness to the nature of attention. 
Psychic states, we are told, have no unity of their 
own; they get their specious unity from attention 
which makes what unity they appear to have. The 
shovelful of coals which I put in the furnace is not 
itself a unity; it gets its unity from me. What then 
am /, — or, more exactly, — what is attention? 

There are three possible doctrines as to the nature 
of attention, which I think will be found to include 
between them all possible views. We may take it, 
namely, in the behavioristic sense, as meaning the 
contraction of certain muscles and the adaptation of 
sense organs to stimuli. Or, if we are to view it in a 
psychical rather than a physiological way, we may 
look at it either from what Professor Breese calls 
the "content side" or from the "subject side." * We 

1 Cf. Chapters I and III of his "Psychology." 



84 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

may, that is, identify it simply with the "clearer" 
portion of our total mental content, or we may use 
the word to indicate the activity and the concentrat- 
ing power of the mind or self. Professor Strong and 
Dr. Picard may have their choice from these three 
uses; I am not able to imagine their inventing a 
fourth. Among the three their choice will pretty 
certainly light upon the first. 1 Yet a moment's con- 
sideration will show that this physical interpretation 
of attention will be utterly useless to them. The 
processes that go on in the muscles of the brow and 
in the sense organs have, in the first place, no unity 
of their own. As Professor Strong himself puts it, 
"The motor attitude, as an objective fact, is obviously 
plural and complex, having only a unity given to it 
by its purposiveness or by our convenience in taking 
it as one." 2 Moreover, it would be quite impossible 
to take seriously the proposition that these physical 
processes somehow pounce upon and single out cer- 
tain past psychic states and put unity into them. 

1 So Dr. Picard assures me, and so we might well guess from 
Prof. Strong's general position. Explicitly he gives us no direct 
answer. On page 269 of the "Origin of Consciousness" he tells us 
that "selective attention is evidently partly a matter of individual 
sensitiveness and partly a matter of instinct." He also speaks of 
the "muscles of attention." This is as near as he comes to telling 
us what he means by the word. 

2 "Origin of Consciousness," p. 278. 



PARALLELISM 85 

Nor is the second general meaning of attention any 
better suited to the unity-making function than was 
the first. If attention be merely a name for those 
parts of our mental content which possess the quality 
of clearness, it is a purely passive state and can do 
nothing. The third doctrine of attention does indeed 
furnish to Professor Strong and Dr. Picard all they 
could wish for. Attention thus conceived is an active 
power of the mind or self, and as such might well 
unify the otherwise chaotic psychic states. But from 
this doctrine of attention, the only one that can be 
of any service to Professor Strong, he will flee as 
from the pestilence. And not for nothing. For this 
doctrine of attention, while explaining fully the 
"specious" unity of consciousness, would be more 
fatal to the Mind-dust Theory than the admission of 
all other kinds of "unity" combined. For such at- 
tention would have a unity of its own, and one so 
genuine and so significant in its implications that if 
once acknowledged it would shatter to hopeless frag- 
ments the whole scheme of mind-stuff and mental 
chemistry. 

Much more might well be said upon this theme 
and upon its obvious bearing on the parallelist view 
of the indefinite divisibility of mind and the possibil- 



86 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ity of correlating a psychic state of minute propor- 
tions with each of the minute sections or specks into 
which the brain might conceivably be divided. But 
for this there is no further time; and I shall simply 
confess in passing not only that I find it difficult to 
view human personality as an organization of mind- 
dust, but that I find it difficult even to understand 
what is meant when the most recent and most phil- 
osophic defender of Parallelism assures me that feel- 
ing is not really what I find when I feel but is rather 
"something truly of the nature of feeling but in ar- 
rangement more like matter in motion" 1 (\) But 
leaving the parallelist view of mind without further 
criticism, let me point out that it leads, just as an 
analysis of the structure of Idealistic Parallelism 
leads, to an absolute denial of all efficiency to what 
we know as consciousness. The personal conscious- 
ness, with its purposes and wishes, its logical and 
aesthetic and hedonic motives, is really a collection 
of mind-dust w T hich is combined and which acts in 
obedience to purely mechanical laws. From two 
points of view, then, we have seen that the efficiency 
of consciousness is incompatible with Parallelism. 
As a fact we might have seen, in advance of our ex- 

x "The Origin of Consciousness/' 319. 



PARALLELISM 87 

animation, that this conclusion was inevitable. For 
plainly no one who holds to the universality of me- 
chanical law can consistently maintain the efficiency 
of consciousness. If non-purposeful, non-logical, 
non-aesthetic laws absolutely and alone control hu- 
man behavior, then purposeful, logical, aesthetic laws 
do not control it and are incapable of influencing it. 
One cannot eat one's cake and keep it too. 

The necessity of giving up the efficacy of con- 
sciousness need not be fatal to Parallelism. But if 
one means to maintain it, he should do so with his 
eyes open. He should realize all that is involved. 
The consequences of such a position are varied. Let 
me remind you of two of them, bearing, namely, upon 
biological evolution and human activity. As to the 
first, the parallelist must face the same dilemma as 
that which proved so difficult for the materialist. 
Professor Strong has developed a parallelist theory in 
carefully thought-out details to the extent of two 
volumes in order to account for the origin of con- 
sciousness. His solution of this problem is, to say 
the best of it, one that raises more questions than it 
settles; and whatever he has done for the origin of 
consciousness he has, for all his pains, made the de- 
velopment of consciousness altogether inexplicable. 



88 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

For if the mechanical laws of matter and energy de- 
termine every case of human or animal activity, then 
plainly the conscious processes of instinct, pleasure, 
pain, desire, and thought do not influence activity. 
Hence they have contributed nothing toward the 
preservation of individual or species; and therefore 
their preservation and development cannot be in the 
least explained by the Darwinian principle of Nat- 
ural Selection. 

The parallelist must account for the evolution of 
the race as best he can without any help from con- 
sciousness. He must do the same for the advance 
of human civilization and for the productions and 
activities of individuals. In the words of Paulsen 
himself, the parallelist must " explain the author of 
the 'Critique of Pure Reason' just as he would ex- 
plain clock work." x Well, perhaps he can do it. 
But I submit that the proposition is so preposterous 
that unless we are shown more compelling reasons 
than the parallelist has as yet furnished, most of us 
will look further in the hope of finding a position 
which will demand of us a little less primitive cre- 
dulity. 

i "Introduction to Philosophy ," p. 88. 



LECTURE III 

THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 

In the preceding lecture we saw that Parallelism 
is quite as untenable as Materialism; that the ac- 
ceptance of it involves one in absurdities to which 
very few, once they realize the true nature of the 
situation, would care to commit themselves. This 
fact about Parallelism, indeed, did not escape the 
thinking world until revealed by my lecture. The 
logical untenability of Parallelism began to dawn 
upon many of its former defenders some time since. 
Fifteen years ago, to be sure, yes, ten years ago, it 
was still the accepted creed of the great majority of 
those interested in the mind-body problem and 
scarcely a voice was raised against it. But its in- 
herent difficulties were struggling to the surface and 
making its defenders increasingly uncomfortable; 
and to-day its popularity is rapidly — almost tragic- 
ally — oozing away, lyric praise is giving place to in- 
difference or even to contempt, and many of its 
former adherents are deserting it as rats desert a 
leaking ship. 

89 



90 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

Whither are they going? Whither can they go? 
If we look back over our list of the possible solutions 
of the mind-body problem we shall see that we have 
reached the end. If Parallelism be not true, where 
shall we look? 

As a matter of fact, while our list certainly in- 
cluded all the proposed, and probably all the possible 
solutions of the problem, it did not include all the 
attitudes that may be taken toward it. There is, at 
any rate, one important attitude which we did hot 
consider and which is being adopted by a constantly 
increasing number of contemporary thinkers. These 
people come from various schools of thought and 
differ among themselves on many important ques- 
tions, but they are at one in rejecting all the his- 
torical solutions of the mind-body problem, not in- 
deed as being false but as being gratuitous. For, say 
they, there is really no such thing as the mind-body 
problem at all. 

The difficulties we have been cudgeling our brains 
for so many centuries to get over, are, it seems, all 
of our own making, all purely artificial, all the result 
of our foolish insistence on setting up two imaginary 
entities, called mind and body. That clever fool 
Descartes started us wrong at the very beginning of 






DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 91 

modern philosophy; and ever since his day, following 
his absurd example, we have been wasting our time 
by the self-defeating process of first defining mind 
and body in such terms that they can never be re- 
lated and then wracking our brains to see how we can 
relate them. For mind and matter are not two dis- 
parate things but one thing; the problem, therefore, 
of their "relation" is altogether artificial, and is de- 
pendent upon a false and dualistic prejudice. The 
so-called mind-body problem can never be solved, 
and never need be; but it can and it should be 
avoided. 

Our natural humiliation at the discovery that we 
have wasted two entire lectures — and that our 
philosophic forebears have been chewing cotton for 
nearly four centuries — over a purely imaginary diffi- 
culty, will, I am sure, be quickly forgotten in the 
satisfaction of realizing that the difficulty we had 
thought so great is actually non-existent and that 
things are really all so simple. Provided, that is, that 
they are all so simple. And indeed we have it on the 
best authority that they are. It is the very latest 
thing in philosophy and psychology and it has the 
backing of the most influential schools. Thinkers so 
far apart as the neo-realists and certain of the ob- 



92 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

jective idealists clasp hands when it comes to this 
question; and reinforcements are constantly arriving 
for this entente cordial from the camps of the be- 
haviorists and the pragmatists. We may take it 
from them, therefore, that there really isn't any prob- 
lem here to be discussed and that we might as well 
pack up and go home, with no more stupid lectures 
on a stupid subject to be delivered and listened to — 
surely a consummation devoutly to be wished. 

Welcome though this is, it seems all a bit bewilder- 
ing, at least for old-fogies; and perhaps we can do 
nothing better with the remainder of this hour than 
try to find out just how it is that mind and body are 
really one and how the problem of their relation may, 
therefore, be avoided. 

The answer to this question we must seek chiefly 
from the neo-realists and the behaviorists. No one, 
to be sure, is louder in declaiming the otiose, artificial, 
and gratuitous nature of the mind-body problem than 
the pragmatists ; but unfortunately they give us very 
little definite information as to how it is to be 
avoided. Perhaps the clearest pragmatic statements 
on the subject are to be found in the writings of 
Professor Bode. It fell to him to deal with the sub- 
ject " Consciousness and Psychology" in the cooper- 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 93 

ative volume * put out a few years ago by a group 
of American pragmatists, and in such a paper the 
question of the relation of mind and body could 
hardly be avoided. Professor Bode's solution of the 
problem consists in pointing out that its seemingly 
great difficulties may be traced back to a "prejudice/' 
the prejudice, namely, of regarding experience or 
knowing as distinguishable from the material ob- 
jects experienced or known. "A careful inventory 
of our assets brings to light no such entities as those 
which have been placed to our credit. We do not 
find body and object and consciousness, but only 
body and object. . . . The process of intelligence is 
something that goes on, not in our minds, but in 
things." 2 The pragmatist, in other words, seeks to 
avoid the mind-body problem by denying that there 
is any such thing as mind or consciousness, in the 
ordinary subjective sense, at all. Consciousness is 
to be interpreted wholly in an objective sense. It 
is, namely, "a certain unique type of control" 
possessed by the stimulus; a characteristic of the 
"object" by which the object controls the "body." 
The control is of such a sort that one may speak of 



1 "Creative Intelligence." 

2 Pp. 254-55. 



94 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

the resulting behavior as " forward-looking/' and in 
this sense one may say that the behavior is "con- 
trolled by the future." Thus "behavior is conscious 
or intelligent, not because there are psychic links 
that get themselves inserted in the series of events, 
but because the process as a whole presents a speci- 
fiable differentiating trait." 1 

Whether persuasive or not, this seems at least 
clear — clear at any rate to the extent of showing that 
the pragmatist avoids the mind-body problem by 
denying the existence of mind altogether — or, what 
amounts to the same thing, by interpreting it wholly 
in terms of the body, Such an attitude toward the 
problem is plainly Materialism once more, and we 
should know perfectly well what to do about it. 
But no sooner has the pragmatist succeeded in mak- 
ing his position clear to us in this fashion than he 
hastens to assure us that we have quite misunder- 
stood him and that he really abhors Materialism. 
No one, in fact, is more insistent than he upon the 
efficiency of consciousness and upon the "creative" 
nature of intelligence. The intelligence which is 
creative, moreover, and the consciousness which is 



iBode, "Intelligence and Behavior," Jour, of Phil, XVIII. 12 
and 13. 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 95 

efficient, for which the pragmatist argues, cannot 
be interpreted to mean merely a "certain type of 
control" possessed by the object. To take it in that 
fashion would rob the pragmatisms contention of all 
significance. The whole point of his repeated pro- 
testation seems to center in the view that the object 
is far from monopolizing the control. The behavior 
of both the body and the object, we are assured, are 
in fact controlled by the future, which is somehow 
present. A future which is somehow present is a per- 
fectly intelligible suggestion if we take it to mean a 
present concept of a future situation or response, a 
"plan of action." In the article already cited Profes- 
sor Bode, in fact, admits that the existence of con- 
cepts in just this old-fashioned psychic sense "is an 
indubitable fact." x But all of this means "dualism" 
and instead of a denial of the mind-body problem 
we would seem by the pragmatist's assertions to be 
forced to accept some form of Interaction. No 
sooner is this pointed out, however, than the prag- 
matist shies off once more as a frightened horse, 
hurls epithets of scorn on Interaction, Materialism, 
and Parallelism, and concludes by asseverating again, 
as Professor Bode does at the close of his recent 

1 'Intelligence and Behavior," p. 17. 



96 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

article, that "the road to progress does not leac 
through the psychophysical problem at all, but 
around it." 

To the pragmatist, as every one will remember, 
a thing is what it is known as; x and a difficulty 
which is not known as a difficulty to the pragmatist 
of course isn't one. For the rest of us, however, 
who are not endowed with the pragmatic facility of 
avoiding difficulties by not knowing them, the prag- 
matisms course of thought which we have been seek- 
ing to follow is sufficiently confusing. My treat- 
ment of it has, of course, been almost unfairly brief; 
but I can only assure the reader who has no time to 
peruse the writings of the pragmatists themselves 
that, in my opinion at least, such further perusal 
would fail to throw any further light upon the way 
in which the mind-body problem is to be avoided. 
Fortunately the whole matter has been most lucidly 
and thoroughly discussed by Professor Lovejoy, and 
I can do no better than refer the reader to his papers 
on the subject. 2 

1 Cf . Dewey, "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism," Jour, of 
Phil., II, 397 and 399- 

2 "Pragmatism as Interaction," Jour, of Phil, XVII, 589-96, 622- 
32; "Pragmatism and the New Materialism," Jour, of Phil., XIX, 
5-15. See also his "Pragmatism versus the Pragmatist" in "Essays 
in Critical Realism." 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 97 

The pragmatist, then, has failed to show the rest 
of us where lies "the road of progress" which is to 
lead us "not through the psychophysical problem 
but around it." This road, whether straight or mar- 
velously crooked, is at any rate a narrow one, and 
few there be who find it. But there are many who 
seek it. And among the number of those who both 
seek and tell us they have found this royal road 
which evades all difficulties, are to be counted not 
only the pragma tists but also (as I indicated above) 
some of the objective idealists. Not all objective 
idealists belong here; some recognize the problem 
and accept the interactionist solution, 1 while some 
(I suppose) are parallelists. But, as I have said, 
there are other objective idealists who insist that the 
mind-body problem should be and must be avoided. 
Most of these — it would be safe to say all of them 
— apparently believe that the easiest way to avoid 
is to avoid, without spending too much thought on 
the problem how the avoiding is to be achieved or 
justified. I wish I could expound their position 
exactly, but nowhere does it seem to be definitely 
stated. The psychophysical problem as a rule is 



1 For example, Dr. Laurie. See the note on Mind and Brain 
appended to Chap. XIV of his "Synthetica," Vol. I. 



98 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

simply shelved, omitted, passed by, as something too 
crude for the attention of those who, having once 
for all taken high ground, should fix their thoughts 
on higher things. For them, somehow, the problem 
has been aufgehoben, and those who make much of 
it are still in the gall and bitterness of dualism. 

Bosanquet gives the problem more consideration 
than some members of his school. Yet the whole 
of his treatment of the subject, as found in his two 
volume work — the Gifford Lectures on the Indi- 
vidual — amounts to a little over two pages. His 
position is as follows: " Consciousness is not an epi- 
phenomenon if we mean something extraneous and 
otiose, but it is a supervenient perfection." * "The 
difference between bodily change and mental action 
cannot be explained away, but while accepting it, 
we have no right to make capital of it in the way 
of multiplying differences praeter necessitate™. In 
saying that body is spatial and mind not spatial we 
have said in effect that body is a causal system and 
mind a logical one. But body is a causal system 
long disciplined and subordinated to a unitary self 
maintenance, and it has within it clearly and obvi- 
ously the bases of all the motives and stimuli which 

1 "Principle of Individuality and Value," p. 202. 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 99 

enter into mind. I believe we have just to accept 
the action and expression of a logical system through 
such a physical one. If it follows that matter is not 
confined to physico-chemical properties we should 
accept the conclusion. But it cannot follow that the 
principle of Uniformity, rightly understood, and of 
conservation of energy, are inapplicable to it. There 
is no ground for contending aggressively that rational 
prediction is inapplicable to its organic forms." x 
"When we maintain that consciousness actually 
works in and through the systematic adaptation of 
a certain type of matter, we are not really adopting 
any one of the three dualistic doctrines, parallelism, 
interaction, epiphenomenalism. . . . The point, as it 
appears to me, is that in all these theories conscious- 
ness is conceived on intentionally dualistic lines, as 
a repetition or duplication of neuroses in a different 
medium or within a different attribute. . . . The 
neurosis is there and complete without the psychosis. 
But there is a psychosis also, in relation or out of 
relation with the neurosis, and there is a problem 
about its supply of physical energy. Nothing of 
this applies to what I was attempting to express in 
the previous lectures [as quoted above]. It seems 

1 "Principle of Individuality and Value," p. 203. 






100 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

to me that the fertile point of view lies in taking 
some neuroses — not all — as only complete in them- 
selves by passing into a degree of psychosis. The 
question of duplicating a neurosis by a psychosis 
does not arise. There can be no problem of a special 
supply of energy for the psychosis. . . . The weigh- 
ing of a situation, begun in a certain balance of nerv- 
ous tensions or inhibitions, has to complete itself in 
a conscious form before the neural crisis can end in 
a motor reaction representing the logical solution. 
It is not repeating in another attribute what has hap- 
pened in one; it is completing in a non-spatial activ- 
ity what, having its source in spatial combinations, 
yet could not be completed by their means pure and 
simple. The change from spatial to non-spatial 
togetherness is of course inexplicable." x 

I have quoted in his own words substantially all 
that Bosanquet has to say upon the mind-body prob- 
lem — largely because I do not pretend to understand 
all that the two passages mean and hence feared to be 
unfair to Idealism if I should attempt to interpret it. 
This much, however, seems plainly to be intended: 
the mind-body problem, as ordinarily understood, is 
really specious because it involves Dualism, and such 

1 " Value and Destiny of the Individual," pp. 2-4. 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 101 

Dualism there is none. Instead of two series which 
duplicate or supplement each other, we have but one. 
This one series may be looked at from two points of 
view, the logical and the causal. When viewed caus- 
ally we call it body, and as such it obeys absolutely 
, the "principle of Uniformity" (by which, presum- 
ably, physical uniformity is intended). The law of 
the conservation of energy holds of all processes 
within the human brain and body, and "rational 
prediction," based apparently upon the "principle of 
Uniformity" and the conservation of energy is as ap- 
plicable to the activities of man's body as to any 
other part of physical nature. But these activities 
are interpretable not only causally but logically. 
As belonging to the logical category they are on a 
higher plane of being than when viewed physically, 
and it is only on this higher plane that they possess 
meaning. Personally I do not see how this is consist- 
ent with what Bosanquet says of the necessity of 
some neuroses passing into a conscious form before 
the neural crises can end in a motor reaction repre- 
senting the logical solution. If there be such a neces- 
sity it would seem to me to imply that the "conscious 
form," the "non-spatial togetherness," contributed 
something toward the physical resultant. However 



102 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

that may be, I see in Bosanquet's words no sugges- 
tion of a means of avoiding Dualism and the mind- 
body problem unless it be in substance what I have 
indicated above — supplemented perhaps by further 
considerations which should do away with individual 
awareness altogether. 

If I am right, then, in my interpretation of Bosan- 
quet, the mind-body problem is to be proved specious 
by doing away with Dualism and showing that the 
mental series and the physical series are neither par- 
allel nor interacting but are merely points of view 
of what is fundamentally one. From the causal 
point of view it follows one set of laws, from that of 
logic or meaning, another. That there is a certain 
plausibility in this view so long as we remain in the 
region of abstract terms I shall not deny; but when 
we descend from the high ground to concrete cases 
all our old difficulties are back on our hands. Doubt- 
less the physical event can be interpreted logically 
and spiritually; but how does that help us? Take, 
for example, a presidential election — let us say, the 
election of Lincoln in 1860. In November of that 
year between four and five million voters went to 
the poles and voted. The physical stimulus was the 
sight of certain ballots, the physical result the selec- 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 103 

tion of some or the marking of all, and the casting 
of them into ballot boxes. Now did the thought and 
the feeling of the voters — their "psychoses" — have 
anything to do with the physical outcome? Either 
they did or they did not; there is no tertium quid. 
If they did influence the physical outcome, then this 
outcome was not wholly determined by the "princi- 
ple of Uniformity" and the conservation of energy; 
and "rational prediction" could not have predicted 
the outcome. In that case, moreover, we have a 
real relation between the mental and the physical, 
a relation, be it added, which is essentially Interac- 
tion, no matter by what name we camouflage it. If, 
on the other hand, the outcome could have been fore- 
told by "rational prediction" on the basis of the 
"principle of Uniformity" and the conservation of 
energy, then psychoses and "non-spatial together- 
ness" had nothing to do with it. If this is the case, 
we are presented with a solution of the mind-body 
problem which only an objective idealist — or possibly 
a pragmatist — could distinguish from Materialism. 
Nor does it help in the least to remind us of the ob- 
vious fact that the physical resultant once it has hap- 
pened, and no matter what it is, is interpretable after 
the fact by logic and spirit and the rest. 



104 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

So far as I can see there is no way of escaping the 
mind-body problem unless consciousness in the sense 
of individual awareness be abandoned. I do not see 
how Bosanquet can do this consistently with his re- 
peated balancing of psychoses against neuroses. 
Others of his school, however, — notably Hoernle, — 
are in a better position to do so, and in fact seem 
to have taken this course. The logic and the actual 
tendency of Objective Idealism is, in fact, all in this 
direction, and I think we may expect to see an in- 
creasingly explicit recognition of it from objective 
idealists in the near future. For the present this 
hypothesis of the identity of the individual's aware- 
ness with its object is most clearly presented, not by 
the objective idealists, but by the neo-realists. It 
will doubtless seem odd if not paradoxical that two 
schools seemingly so antipodal as these should, on 
the important question of the nature of conscious- 
ness, be classed together; but that they are defend- 
ing practically the same position can hardly be 
doubted by any reader who pierces through their 
terms to their meanings. The truth is that while 
the two schools started out in directions as diverse 
from each other as the East is from the West, one 
of them has gone so far west and the other so far 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 105 

east that they have met at the antipodes and joined 
forces, and so far as our problem is concerned, are 
now in fact, if not in name, almost indistinguishable. 
Both may well be classed under one title, — namely 
epistemological monists — since both maintain that 
no essential distinction is to be made between mind 
and matter. As the neo-realists have dealt with 
this question rather more definitely and more 
completely than their idealistic allies, we had best 
confine ourselves to their exposition of the ques- 
tion. 

For the neo-realist, then, objects in and by them- 
selves should not be called either mental or physical. 
In themselves they are neutral, — "neutral entities" 
they may well be called. Such an object, neutral in 
itself, may enter into and pass out of various groups 
formed by other objects, and in so doing it may, for 
the time, become mental or physical, or both. When 
it is one of a group which is selected out, so to speak, 
by the action of our organs of perception and 
thought, it is called mental or conscious. In so far, 
on the other hand, as it is a member of a group of 
things in the common space we call it physical. It 
may be physical and psychical at the same time, and 
there is no more difficulty in this than there is in the 



106 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

same man being a member of two different clubs. 
Nor is this view strained and artificial, for is it really 
anything else than that of the plain man, who believes 
that he sees his objects directly and who makes no 
distinction between his percepts and the physical 
things which he perceives? When we look at the 
question in this way we see that consciousness 
ceases to be a special sort of substance or entity or 
type of being, and becomes instead merely a special 
sort of relation or grouping. Consciousness, in short, 
is but a name for those objects toward which an or- 
ganism is at the given time reacting. Since, there- 
fore, there is no such thing as consciousness in the 
old sense, consciousness as distinct from its objects, 
no dualism is left between body and mind and hence 
no theory is needed as to their relation. 

Tempting as is this identification of mental con- 
tent with physical and logical objects, I must say 
very frankly — and perforce very briefly — that it is 
to me profoundly unpersuasive and unsatisfactory. 
For I seem to find, and I think the man in the street 
finds, a great deal in what we know as consciousness 
which is not to be identified with any common and 
shareable objects, whether physical, logical, or imagi- 
nary. To be as concise as possible, each of the fol- 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 107 

lowing six objections seems to me so formidable as 
to be by itself fatal to the position of the epistemo- 
logical monist. 

(1) The physical and physiological processes of 
perception, as described by Science and never dis- 
puted, show conclusively that the physical object 
which starts the perceptive process agoing is not iden- 
tifiable with the percept which results from it. 
Whether we take a realistic or an idealistic view, 
there is such a thing as this watch, and there is such 
an event as its reflection of ether waves. Physiologi- 
cal psychologists assure us (and nobody so far as I 
know denies it) that these waves strike upon the ret- 
ina and thereby set up a certain process in the optic 
nerve which is carried on into the occipetal region 
of the brain. Either immediately after this brain 
process has been set up or concomitantly with it, a 
sensation is born which we call a sensation of the 
watch. Now the neo-realist is bound to hold that 
this sensation and the watch, which by its reflection 
of ether waves started the whole process going, are 
one and identical — in spite of the fact that between 
the two are intercalated the entire physical and phys- 
iological series of events indicated above, and in 
spite of the further fact that such an hypothesis 



108 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

would seem to identify the sensation with its cause 
and the watch with its effect. 

(2) The visual images which two or more ob- 
servers get from the same object, and which the 
same observer will get from it at varied distances and 
varied angles, since they differ from each other, can- 
not be identified with each other, and hence cannot 
be identical with the object (as Neo-Realism claims 
that they are). The only answer which the neo- 
realist can make to this objection is to identify 
every object with all its actual and possible appear- 
ances at any and every angle and any and every 
distance, and thus explode each object to the extrem- 
est bounds of the spatial universe. 

(3) Since the process of perception takes time, 
the event which I perceive happens at a different mo- 
ment from that at which I perceive it. Plainly when 
I see a star reflecting light the event which I see 
was over long before I saw it, and the star itself 
may have disappeared; and though in ordinary per- 
ception the time process is much shorter the principle 
remains the same. Similarly, when I remember an 
event of my childhood or picture the battle of Sala- 
mis, my mental content is an actuality of to-day, my 
object an event of forty or of 2400 years ago. Yet 









DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 109 

in all these cases Neo-realism would identify the 
present conscious content with the past object. This, 
of course, is a manifest contradiction in terms, and 
the only way it can be avoided is by exploding each 
event to the extremes of time, just as on the same 
theory every object had to be exploded to the ex- 
tremities of space, thus making of the universe a 
chaotic and jelly-like welter of interpenetrating neu- 
tral entities. 

(4) The neo-realist is forced to maintain that the 
content of one individual mind may be completely 
and numerically identical with that of other minds; 
that my thoughts, feelings, and impulses may be actu- 
ally yours; that my pain may be numerically your 
pain, and that our minds have, in principle, no pri- 
vacy which others cannot pierce. Against this view 
it seems to me that Professor James is right when 
he asserts that the breaches between " thoughts be- 
longing to different personal minds . . . are the 
most absolute breaches in nature." * 

(5) Some of the content of mind seems to be con- 
spicuously private and subjective, and incapable of 
even that semi-plausible identification with outer 
objects which superficially seems possible in the case 

1 "Psychology," p. 153. 



110 MATTER AND SPIRIT 






of veridical percepts and true ideas. I refer to such 
things as ideas of admittedly non-existent objects 
such as round-squares; emotions, impulses; pleasures 
and pains; values, consciousness of meaning, and 
peculiarly subjective qualities such as clearness. 

(6) Sixthly and finally I cannot forget the exist- 
ence of error, illusion, and halucination, nor can I 
conceive of any way in which these experiences can 
be explained unless we admit the distinction between 
the psychical and the physical as ultimate and dif- 
ferent categories. 

For these six reasons — each of which needs expan- 
sion to considerable length if one is to appreciate its 
real importance — I find it impossible to identify the 
content of consciousness with objects. And this holds 
whether we view the matter realistically or idealistic- 
ally. In my reference to Objective Idealism, some 
pages back, I did not mean to imply that its view was 
in all respects identical with that of Neo-realism; and 
my six objections to the latter might not all apply 
to the idealistic view. But in so far as Objective 
Idealism differs from Neo-realism it does so by ap- 
proximating more nearly to a dualistic view of con- 
sciousness and its objects. From many points of 
view, therefore, it seems to me that we are forced 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 111 

to recognize a substantial distinction — a distinction 
in existence — between conscious content and exter- 
nal, physical objects. But just in so far as we do 
this we have the old dualism once more on our hands 
and are faced again with the old and persistent ques- 
tion of the interrelation of the psychical and the phy- 
sical. Consciousness as psychical content cannot be 
identified with external objects, and the attempt to 
dodge the mind-body problem in this fashion will 
not work. 

Let us suppose for the moment, however, that we 
can forget our difficulties and put aside our doubts 
and accept the neo-realistic way of disposing of men- 
tal content. A further difficulty will still await us. 
What, namely, shall we do with mental processes} 
For the sake of the argument let us momentarily 
identify our percepts and our memory images with 
their external objects; what shall we do with the 
processes of attention and thought, with effort and 
will, and what shall we do with purpose and cognition? 

It is at this point that the new psycho-philosophi- 
cal tendency known as Behaviorism comes to the res- 
cue of both Neo-realism, Objective Idealism, and 
Pragmatism. It provides them with a way of hand- 
ling mental processes which involves no troublesome 



112 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

problem of the relation of the mental to the physical. 
But it would be a mistake to regard Behaviorism as 
merely an ally of these three schools. It is decidedly 
a principal in the controversy and it looms to-day, 
indeed, as the largest of the quadruple alliance. 

Behaviorism originated as a method in animal 
psychology. Out of patience with the futile attempt 
to tell what the animal was thinking about or how 
it was feeling when put through various experiments, 
the investigators in this field at length said, Why 
bother our heads as to this unanswerable question? 
The important thing for science is to know how the 
animal reacts in the presence of various stimuli. Let 
us, therefore, frankly make the object of our study 
not the animal's hypothetical consciousness but its 
actual behavior. So successful was this reorganiza- 
tion of method in getting results that were truly ob- 
jective, verifiable, and scientific, that certain of the 
bolder spirits proposed it should be applied also to 
human psychology; and applied it has been. The 
experimenter observes the reactions, the behavior, 
the physiological processes of his subject, makes ob- 
jective measurements with instruments of precision, 
and never asks for his subject's introspection nor 
bothers as to his consciousness. The objectivity of 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 113 

these observations is one of the advantages claimed 
for the new method by its adherents, but they also 
enthusiastically recommend it as a welcome means 
of escaping the age-long psychophysical problem 
and of putting permanently on the shelf all its tradi- 
tional solutions. "In Behaviorism/' says Professor 
Watson, "one avoids both the Scylla of parallelism 
and the Charybdis of interaction. Those time-hon- 
ored relics of philosophical speculation need trouble 
the student of behavior as little as they trouble the 
student of physics." x "The issue [as to the relation 
of mind and body] is not decided/' writes another 
behaviorist; "but it is no longer a living one. A 
growing sense of its futility has come upon us. . . . 
The conviction has gained ground among us that 
such a belief is a survival of older modes of thought, 
in other fields happily outgrown." 2 

These quotations indicate one of the ways in which 
the behaviorist succeeds in avoiding the mind-body 
problem. It does not "trouble" him. Though the 
issue between the proposed solutions "is not de- 
cided," "it is no longer a living one" for him. He 
feels increasingly that it is futile. For his own part, 

1 "Behavior," p. 9. 

2 Mrs. De Laguna, "The Empirical Correlation of Mind and 
Body," Jour, of Phil, 1918, p. 533. 



114 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

he is not interested in it. He does not need to use 
the concept of consciousness in his business and he 
is not going to let theoretical questions of its rela- 
tion to the physical take his attention from the real 
work of tracing out in scientific and objective fashion 
the facts of human behavior in terms of stimulus and 
response. 

No one can very well criticize the behaviorist for 
taking this attitude. Here as elsewhere, de gustibus 
non disputandum ; and if he is not interested in our 
problem we have no desire to thrust it down his 
throat. When, however, from this personal attitude 
of his own and of his fellows he draws the conclu- 
sion (as he usually does) that the mind-body prob- 
lem is unreal, the comment is obvious. The fact 
that he is not interested in consciousness nor in the 
mind-body problem may be an interesting fact in his 
personal biography but it has no bearing whatever 
on the inherent interest and importance of the prob- 
lem itself. There is no mind-body problem for him 
in just the same sense as that there is no mind-body 
problem for the lawyer and that the squaring of the 
circle is no problem for the Assyriologist. In other 
words, the bearing of Behaviorism upon the relation 
between consciousness and its physiological accom- 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 115 

paniments is not to be determined by the subjective 
tastes of the behaviorist, but can be settled only by 
an objective examination of Behaviorism. 

The word Behaviorism is used in two quite dis- 
tinct senses. It may, on the one hand, be taken as 
a method in psychology — the method, namely, which 
refuses to make any use of introspection or any refer- 
ence to consciousness, and which insists that as psy- 
chologists we should study only bodily reactions and 
physiological processes. But secondly it may be 
taken in more metaphysical fashion ; it may, namely, 
mean that consciousness is behavior, and that in any 
other sense it simply does not exist. Because of this 
ambiguity of the term, the critic of Behaviorism is 
constantly in danger of doing injustice to the be- 
haviorist. The accusation is sometimes made against 
an individual behaviorist that he is denying the exist- 
ence of consciousness when as a fact he means by his 
expressions merely to assert that for purposes of 
scientific description one should avail oneself only 
of the objective facts of observable behavior. On 
the other hand, the behaviorist himself is quite as 
likely as his critic to be seduced into a misleading 
use of this rather slippery term. He has been known, 
in fact, — and not infrequently — to take advantage 



116 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

of the ambiguity so as to swing back and forth be- 
tween methodology and metaphysics in such fashion 
as to baffle pursuit; to appear to be talking meta- 
physics and when threatened with certain unpleasant 
metaphysical consequences of his view to cry out in- 
dignantly that he meant nothing but methodology, 
and then when the danger was over to slide back once 
more into statements which must be taken meta 
physically if they are to have any special significance. 
If, therefore, in analyzing Behaviorism we owe it to 
the behaviorist not to attribute to the terms he uses a 
meaning which he does not intend, we owe it to our- 
selves not to permit him to avoid the issue by dodg- 
ing suddenly and repeatedly from one interpretation 
of his thesis to the other. 

Let us, then, consider Behaviorism in the first 
place as merely a method of psychology. And on 
this little need here be said. For the difficult con- 
troversy between the behaviorists and the introspec- 
tionists concerns us in only one point. We may have 
our own opinions as to the possibility of giving a 
complete or even a very intelligent description of 
human nature by a method that leaves consciousness 
(in the ordinary sense of the word) entirely out 
of account; but so long as the behaviorist sticks 



: 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 117 

to his measurements and makes no statements 
either explicit or implicit concerning consciousness 
we shall have nothing to say, because his as- 
sertions so far forth have no bearing upon the 
mind-body problem. But as a fact, the behavior- 
ist means his method to have a very definite 
bearing upon the mind-body problem; it is, as 
we have often been told, a means of avoiding it alto- 
gether. Now so long as Behaviorism remains merely 
a method it is plain that there is only one way in 
which it can enable us to avoid this question of the 
relation of the psychical to the physical. This is, 
namely, by insisting that the psychical has no rela- 
tion to the physical that is of any importance to 
science. In fact, this is exactly the presupposition 
of Behaviorism as a method. Human behavior, it 
maintains, can be adequately and completely de- 
scribed and explained by the anatomy and physiology 
of the body and by the nature of the various physical 
stimuli that play upon it. No reference to con- 
sciousness is either needed or in any way helpful. 
If at a single point a reference to consciousness were 
necessary in order to explain any detail of human con- 
duct, that would constitute a lacuna in the chain of 
behavioristic explanations; and to admit such a 



118 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

necessity would be to admit the insufficiency of Be- 
haviorism as well as the need of some theory as to 
the relation of consciousness to its physiological cor- 
relates. Of this the behaviorist is thoroughly aware 
and as a fact he insists that consciousness can have 
no real effect upon conduct. "The pleasurable tone 
which accompanies certain of our acts/' writes Dr. 
Peterson in the Psychological Review, 1 "is of course 
only a subjective indication that the response is along 
the line of least resistance. . . . We are coming to 
a point now in psychology at which we cannot look 
upon states of feeling as causes of action." The little 
word "of course" which Dr. Peterson here brings in 
so naturally, is significant. Of course for the be- 
haviorist pleasure can be only an accompaniment and 
not a cause. Indeed how could it or any other form 
of consciousness be a cause of action if all causes of 
action are summed up in physical stimuli and physi- 
ological processes or "sets'? On the question of the 
efficiency of consciousness, therefore, Behaviorism, 
even when understood only as a method, is obliged 
to take exactly the same position as Materialism. 

But Behaviorism cannot take the position of Ma- 
terialism and avoid its difficulties. If the behaviorist 

1 Psychological Review, XXIII, 1916, pp. 157-58. 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 119 

psychology "cannot look upon states of feeling as 
causes of action" how is it going to explain their rise 
and development? If the animal who felt pain when 
acting in a way injurious to its health and who felt 
pleasure when acting in a way beneficial to itself and 
to the species had no advantage over the animal who 
felt neither pain nor pleasure, how came these feel- 
ings to be selected and transmitted? What is the 
use and what the survival value of a mere "subjective 
indication"? Why is any indication needed, and in- 
deed to whom is it an indication? And not only is 
the evolution of consciousness quite impossible of 
explanation for the behaviorist; so is its odd persist- 
ence in human nature. For if the behaviorist method 
be justified, consciousness has no more influence upon 
the conduct of the man than upon the conduct of the 
tomato. Take the famous telegram case, suggested 
in another connection by Busse. 1 A German father 
receives a telegram reading "Fritz angekommen" 
and spends the day in joyful and elaborate prepara- 
tion for the return of his son from a long voyage. 
At night- fall he receives a second wire reading "Fritz 
umgekommen" which means that instead of Fritz 
having arrived at port, Fritz is dead. Prostrated at 

1 "Geist und Korper," p. 310. 



120 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

the news the father faints and perhaps himself dies. 
Now the behaviorist must account for the enormous 
contrast between the vigorous activities of the morn- 
ing and the fainting fit and heart failure of the night 
without any reference to the father's consciousness 
of the meaning of either telegram. The transforma- 
tion of the man's behavior was due to the exchange 
of an a for a u in the stimulus. 

There is one way in which the behaviorist may 
get out of his difficulty if he be bold enough, and 
that is to assert his Behaviorism not merely as a 
method but as a metaphysic. He may, namely, insist 
clearly and openly that there isn't any such thing as 
consciousness in the ordinary sense at all; that the 
only sort of consciousness existent is just physiolog- 
ical processes; and that therefore there isn't any 
problem to be solved. This, in fact, is exactly what 
the materialists and parallelists have all along 
yearned to do and what they would have done but 
that they lacked the courage. Consciousness has al- 
ways been the great obstacle to a consistent and uni- 
versal Naturalism; and adherents of that doctrine 
have really wished in the bottom of their hearts that 
the existence of consciousness might somehow be 
flatly denied. Experience has shown that if you give 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 121 

consciousness an inch it will take an ell, and through 
centuries of attempted compromise it has been pain- 
fully proved that with consciousness no compromise 
is possible. But up to our time, somehow, when it 
came to the pinch, courage has been lacking. The 
naturalists have longed to cry delenda est but have 
never quite dared. But whatever else we may think 
of the more extreme behaviorists, lack of courage is 
seldom one of their faults. They do not indeed deny 
in words that consciousness in its various forms ex- 
ists; but they insist that consciousness is just be- 
havior — muscular, glandular, and nervous processes, 
— and that in any other sense than this there is no 
such thing as consciousness. "It is a serious mis- 
understanding of the behaviorist position/' writes 
Professor Watson, "to say, 'Of course a behaviorist 
does not deny that mental states exist; he merely pre- 
fers to ignore them.' He ignores them in the same 
sense that chemistry ignores alchemy, and astronomy 
horoscopy. The behaviorist does not concern him- 
self with them because as the stream of his science 
broadens and deepens such older concepts are sucked 
under, never to reappear." 1 "Thought is not dif- 



1 Reply to his critics in the Symposium at Oxford in 1920. 
British Journal of Psychology, 1920, p. 94. 



122 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ferent in essence from tennis playing, swimming, or 
any other activity except that it is hidden from ordi- 
nary observation and is more complex." x To be 
more explicit, thought consists in the activity of the 
language mechanisms, if we may include within this 
term the activities not only of the glottis, larynx, 
tongue, and lips, but all the allied reactions of hand 
and body by which gesture and posture help out 
words. And this is meant quite literally. The activ- 
ities of these bodily mechanisms are not the expres- 
sions of thought; they are thought, and behind them 
or beside them there is no so-called psychic state of 
thinking. In similar fashion Dr. Frost defines aware- 
ness as "the relation between two neural arcs," 2 and 
Professor Singer asserts, "Consciousness is not some- 
thing inferred from behavior. It is behavior." 3 

Illustrations of this extremely courageous meta- 
physical position might be added at considerable 
length. And it must be freely admitted that here at 
last we have a position which, if we can accept it, 
will enable us quite consistently to avoid and to 
repudiate the mind-body problem. But can we ac- 

1 Watson, "Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist," 

p. 325. 

2 "Cannot Psychology Dispense with Consciousness ?" Psychol. 
Rev., XXI, pp. 204-11. 

« "Mind as an Observable Object," Jour, of Phil, VIII, p. 180. 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 123 

cept it? There's the rub! And this is a question, 
as it seems to me, that each man must answer for 
himself, for it is hardly susceptible of argument. 
Various considerations may indeed be referred to — 
considerations such as those brought forward at the 
Symposium upon this subject held at Oxford in 
1920, at which all the English psychologists who par- 
ticipated, without a single exception, put themselves 
on record as unalterably opposed to any attempt to 
identify consciousness with behavior. To these Eng- 
lish thinkers, the proposal seemed preposterous. 
Various considerations, as I have indicated, were ap- 
pealed to in defense of this view, — for which, since 
our time is short, let me refer you to the British Jour- 
nal of Psychology for October, 1920. Still other con- 
siderations might well be added. Every new lan- 
guage one learns gives one a new vocal process for a 
given meaning. We have as many different bodily 
behaviors for an identical idea as we have languages. 
We have, of course, very many more. Within a given 
language any idea may be expressed by, or correlated 
with, a large number of processes of the language 
mechanism. Dr. Watson himself tells us that "one 
can take his pen in his right hand and write any 
given word by using thirty or more different finger 



124 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

and palm combinations." Dr. Lashley (a colleague 
of Dr. Watson) gets a different tracing every time 
his subject thinks over a given sentence. The mus- 
culature of the larynx and throat, Dr. Watson assures 
us, are so varied that "we can think the same word 
by many different muscular combinations." Fifty 
or a hundred different linguistic ways of expressing 
an idea, fifty or a hundred different forms of be- 
havioristic thought, may thus all mean the same 
thing. But how can the one thought be identical 
with each of the fifty or one hundred processes? Con- 
versely, the same word, produced by the same vocal 
or the same manual activity, may mean two or more 
quite different things— as for example well, sound, 
lark, — any word with a double meaning. It would 
seem that in these two sets of cases we have what 
Professor Perry might well call "independent vari- 
ability" of thought and of linguistic process. 

The only way out of this difficulty for the be- 
haviorist, so far as I can see, is flatly to deny that we 
do or can mean the same thing in any two cases where 
the bodily processes are at all different; and con- 
versely to assert boldly that in cases where the bodily 
processes are the same we mean the same, regardless 
of the mental images or the consciousness of meaning 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 125 

which we may find by introspection ; that, for exam- 
ple, when I incipiently speak the word boom I mean 
the same thing whether the linguistic activity be ac- 
companied by a visual image of part of a sailboat or 
by an auditory image connected with a cannon. I 
do not think this answer from the behaviorist would 
be very persuasive to any one outside the fold. But 
on the other hand I have no hope that the argument 
I have suggested against his view will have any effect 
upon the behaviorist. For, after all, the very ques- 
tion at issue is whether such things as mental images, 
ideas, meanings, exist at all. 

Professor Lovejoy's "paradox of the thinking be- 
haviorist" may have better success. He points out 
that while it is always possible for the behaviorist to 
deny the existence of subjective consciousness in the 
subjects whom he observes, he cannot deny it in his 
own case as an observer. His observations must be 
of the conscious sort and can hardly be interpreted as 
mere bodily behavior. They cannot be so interpreted 
because they profess, in the behaviorist's own ac- 
count, to deal with things and events outside of his 
organism. "Thought constantly deals with the dis- 
tant in space and with the remote in time; but the 
movements of the language mechanisms in which the 



126 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

thought of the given moment is supposed to consist 
are strictly inter-corporeal and are limited to that 
moment." * Moreover, the behaviorist "will certainly 
not deny that he 'observes' and thinks of things, 
things not contained within his own skin; he cannot 
take the first step in the formulation of his own ac- 
count of the antecedents and determinants of bodily 
behavior without making this claim for himself." ! 
He does, moreover, repeatedly make the distinction 
between bodily processes which are observed and 
those which escape observation — a distinction which 
is meaningless if observation consist in just the 
bodily processes themselves. In conclusion, Pro- 
fessor Lovejoy points out, "if perceiving and think- 
ing are what Watson says they are and nothing more, 
no organism can ever know either what it is doing or 
what object evokes its response; and therefore no 
psychological investigator can possess such knowl- 
edge. The only consistent behaviorist would be one 
who knew nothing whatever, who at no moment of 
his existence could do more than relax or contract 
his muscles, without being aware that he was doing 
so. And to maintain even a decent semblance of con- 

ir The Paradox of the Thinking Behaviorist/' Phil. Review, 
XXXI, p. 142. 
2 Ibid., p. 141. 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 127 

sistency the behaviorist should at least refrain from 
professing to know anything. Behaviorism, in short, 
belongs to that class of theories which become absurd 
as soon as they become articulate. "The Paradox of 
the Thinking Behaviorist" deserves to take its place 
in the logic-books beside that of 'Epimenides >of 
Crete' to which it is closely related." 1 

I do not see that the behaviorist can avoid the logic 
of this argument. But that does not mean that it 
can be logically expected to have any effect upon 
him. Since logic in the sense in which Love joy means 
it does not exist, how can the behaviorist consistently 
allow himself to be affected by it? He is quite will- 
ing to be accused of not knowing anything whatever, 
— in Professor Lovejoy's sense of knowing. He can 
relax and contract his muscles, and is not that 
enough? Already nearly a dozen years ago a dis- 
tinguished representative of the school dealt ex- 
plicitly with this matter, writing thus: "I regard my 
own mind as behavior quite as frankly as I take my 
fellow's mind to be nothing else." 2 The only way, 
he continues, in which he can tell whether so-called 
green objects and so-called red objects look alike to 

1 Op. cit., p. 147. 

2 Prof. Singer, "Mind as an Observable Object," Jour, of Phil.. 
VIII, p. 184. 



128 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

him is by watching himself act; if he acts in the same 
way toward both he concludes that he gets only one 
sensation from the two. This last assertion, to be 
sure, looks like an unfortunate lapse into Lovejoy's 
trap, due to inadvertence; for watching himself act 
would seem to imply consciousness. But the con- 
sistent behaviorist might reply that "watching" is 
merely another form of behavior, and that he does 
not know that he is doing it or anything else. 

In short, if the behaviorist will be sufficiently wary 
to avoid all statements involving knowledge or ob- 
servation or, better still, if he will avoid making 
statements of any sort and will content himself with 
relaxing and contracting his muscles, he may make 
himself armor proof against all attack. Hence as I 
said some time ago, the question of the existence of 
consciousness seems hardly arguable. It must be 
settled for each man by himself. Do you or do you 
not, the real question reads, find — actually find — 
within your own experience such things as conscious 
pains and pleasures, conscious thought processes, con- 
scious purposes, conscious ones, mind you, in the old- 
fashioned sense of the word and not to be identified 
with any physiological processes no matter how sub- 
tle? For my own part I will hazard the guess that 



DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 129 

most of us assembled here would very emphatically 
answer Yes to this question: that most of us find 
our thought is of the old-fashioned conscious sort; 
although, if our behaviorist friends insist, it may be 
that courtesy will force us to accept their assertion 
that their thinking, — the thinking by which they 
have arrived at such remarkable conclusions — is 
really nothing more than the unconscious activity of 
the language mechanism. 

Well, we have come to the end of our third lecture, 
and we seem farther from a solution of our problem 
than we were at the end of the first. All our results 
thus far have been negative. We have considered in 
principle all the answers to the problem that have 
yet been suggested, all that probably ever can be 
suggested, and not one of them has commended itself 
to our minds. Yet one of these answers must be true, 
for we have found that every attempt to deny or 
avoid the problem leads us to absurdities as great as 
those involved in the most absurd of the proposed 
solutions. What shall we do, what can we do about 
it? My only suggestion is the humiliating one that 
we may have been too hasty in our rejection of some 
of the proposed solutions, and hence that we go back 
on our steps and see whether any of them merits re- 



130 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

examination. This, however, will involve some de- 
tailed analysis, and we must, therefore, postpone it 
until our next lecture. A rather gloomy closing to 
this one that means, I confess. But personally I am 
hopeful that the light we have gained from these 
three negative lectures may yet aid us in reaching a 
real solution of our very real problem. 






LECTURE IV 

THE DIFFICULTIES OF INTERACTION 

Our last lecture came to a rather disappointing 
close. We had passed in review all the leading, and 
probably all the possible, hypotheses as to the rela- 
tion of mind and body, and none of them had proved 
entirely satisfactory or acceptable. But on the other 
hand we had seen pretty plainly that there was noth- 
ing artificial about the problem and that all attempts 
to dodge it either led to manifest absurdities or were 
due to an ostrich-like attempt to destroy difficulties 
by refusing to look at them. The situation was per- 
plexing; and as you will remember I finally sug- 
gested that the only way out might be to look back 
over our list of proposed solutions and see whether 
all of them were indeed as difficult of acceptance as 
we had supposed. To that closer scrutiny of our 
own previous criticisms I now invite your attention. 

There can, I think, be no question whatever as to 
the reality and the crucial nature of the problem. 
Behaviorism and its allies have, as it seems to me, 
been altogether unsuccessful in their paradoxical at- 

131 



132 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

tempts to deny the existence of any relation between 
mind and body. Parallelism in its leading forms we 
studied in considerable detail and, I think, in no un- 
sympathetic spirit; and I see no conceivable reason 
for altering the unfavorable judgment to which we 
were forced. Materialism also we analyzed with 
some care; and the great difficulties which it involved 
were so patent that I feel sure nothing would be 
gained by a reconsideration of its assertions. Of all 
the proposed solutions of our problem Interaction 
alone was put aside with a rather summary and in- 
adequate consideration. We hardly more than 
glanced at it, as you will remember, and not yet real- 
izing how difficult was our problem, we hurried on 
to more promising suggestions. Having seen now, 
through a slow and I fear painful course of reason- 
ing, how fallacious were all these promises, we owe 
it in fairness to ourselves to give to Interaction the 
same sort of serious consideration that we have given 
to each of the other hypotheses. 

What then, we must ask ourselves, were the dif- 
ficulties which we found with Interaction which 
made us pass it by as unsatisfactory? One of them 
which indeed we hardly made explicit at the time 
but which undoubtedly influenced our judgment con- 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 133 

siderably was the very obvious fact that Interaction 
is unpopular in scientific circles; that it is, in the 
words of one of its critics already once quoted, "a 
survival of older modes of thought, in other fields 
happily outgrown." None of us, I suppose, is alto- 
gether immune against the effect of social disap- 
proval, and our original disinclination to accept a 
theory adherence to which is regarded by all up-to- 
date minds as a sign of old-fogyism was very likely 
due in considerable degree to the subtle influence of 
social pressure. It hardly needs remarking, how- 
ever, that such influence is not argument and that 
unpopularity in a theory does not spell refutation. 
The assertion that the tendency of contemporary 
thought is all against Interaction, moreover, will not 
seem tremendously impressive to any one whose mem- 
ory goes back as far as fifteen or twenty years. 
Twenty years ago Idealism was accepted by almost 
every philosopher of any reputation as indisputably 
the last word in thought; and to be called a realist 
was to be called a fool, if not a knave. We have seen 
all that changed in cinematographic fashion. To- 
day in many quarters the only idealists who dare 
show their heads without covering them with neo- 
realistic caps are extraordinarily courageous souls. 



134 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

In the same twenty years, we have seen Pragmatism 
invade the land — and then quietly retreat from some 
of its advanced positions. Within the field of science 
things are being said by biologists about that holy 
thing called Darwinism which would have caused 
unspeakable pain to many an evolutionist of twenty 
years ago. And in Physics the unshakeable I need 
only mention the name Einstein and say no more. I 
repeat, then, that to one whose memory has a span 
of twenty years or so the popularity or unpopularity 
of a given doctrine in scientific circles is a remarkably 
unimpressive consideration. We may, therefore, 
properly put on one side the fact that belief in Inter- 
action has been "happily outgrown" by many of our 
scientific contemporaries, and proceed to a considera- 
tion of its real difficulties. 

These difficulties, you will doubtless recall, were 
two-fold. Interaction, namely, involved an impossi- 
ble view of causation, and secondly it was incon- 
sistent with the universality of mechanical law. This 
second difficulty divided itself into a more specific 
and a more general consideration. On the one hand 
Interaction seemed plainly incompatible with the 
principle of the conservation of energy; and on the 
other it as plainly made impossible unobstructed 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 135 

domination over all the world of matter and motion 
by the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. 

The first of these difficulties, the causal one, 1 is 
plainly a question that can be settled only by 
philosophy. This seems too obvious to deserve men- 
tion, yet oddly enough it is quite forgotten by many 
objectors. In their opinion the matter is to be set- 
tled not by philosophy or thought but by imagination. 
Thus a distinguished scientist bids us "try to imagine 
the idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules to- 
gether." We are assured we cannot do this, and the 
conclusion is immediately drawn that therefore mind 
and body can never influence each other. A remark- 
ably simple and valuable scientific method this. Con- 
sistently adopted and skillfully applied it will solve 
all the problems of science and philosophy. Is the 
earth indeed spherical? The contemporaries of Co- 
lumbus settled it conclusively in the negative by an 
appeal to this method. Try to imagine people stand- 



1 It is thus expressed by Wundt : "Die cartesianische Theorie 
nahm volkommen consequent Bewegungen in beiden Richtungen an ; 
der Korper wirkt nach ihr ebenso auf die Seele wie die Seele auf 
den Korper. Nun liegt der Grund, weshalb diese Theorie heute 
unhaltbar erscheint, lediglich darin, dass sie ein ursachliche Verbin- 
dung zwischen vollig unvergleichbaren Thatsachen voraussetzt. 
Eine Empfindung kann aus einer Bewegung ebenso wenig abgeleitet 
werden, wie eine Bewegung aus einer Empfindung." "Philosophische 
Studien," Vol. VI, p. 353. 



136 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ing with their feet up and their heads down! "It is 
impossible. " If, however, we are dissatisfied with 
this easy method of settling the problem of the possi- 
ble causal relation of body and mind, we shall ap- 
peal, as I have said, not to the imagination but to 
philosophy. 

Is Interaction, then, incompatible with causation? 
Is it conceivable or not that two things so diverse as 
matter and mind may be causally related? If phi- 
losophy is to settle this question it must first of all 
ask another and antecedent question, namely, what 
do we mean by causation? Now philosophers are 
far from being agreed on the details of this matter, 
but fortunately for us they are nearly all agreed on 
so much of the answer as is relevant to our problem. 
There are two negative characteristics of causation 
which were settled once for all by David Hume nearly 
three hundred years ago and which have seldom been 
seriously questioned by reputable philosophers since. 
The first of these negative characteristics of causa- 
tion is the absence from it of any rational necessity. 
Neither causal relation nor the lack of it can be 
predicated by reason of any two objects or events, 
prior to experience. Without observing the actions 
of two objects you can never tell in advance whether 






INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 137 

one of them can effect the other or cannot do so. 
Causation, according to Hume, is merely regular and 
invariable sequence, and whether or not it holds be- 
tween two kinds of things is to be determined only 
by experience. The second negative characteristic 
.of causation which Hume pointed out is the absence 
of any observable "power" passing over from cause 
to effect or of any "real tie" binding them together. 
Watch one object or event cause another; you can 
never see any power in the first nor any tie between 
them. You see simply one event following another. 
As I have already said, Hume's position on these two 
matters has been almost universally accepted by both 
philosophy and science. We can neither see causa- 
tion in any other sense than that of regular sequence 
nor argue to it deductively in any given instance. 
Prior to experience it is absurd for us to attempt to 
say what can and what cannot cause something else. 
Whether a given thing is the cause of another is in 
every case to be settled purely by appeal to experi- 
ence. So much, we are safe in saying, practically all 
contemporary thinkers will admit; and not a few 
would go further and declare, with Bertrand Russell, 
that science no longer looks for causes "because there 
are no such things," and that "the law of causality is 



138 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

a relic of a bygone age." 1 In place of the older 
notion of causes and effects, these thinkers would 
substitute a certain uniformity of nature capable of 
being expressed in various differential equations. 

Having now seen what causation means, let us re- 
turn to the mind-body problem. We are asked, How 
can two things so dissimilar affect each other at all? 
To which the obvious reply is the further question, 
Why can they not? Is it so certain that dissimilar 
things must fail to influence each other? Whether 
they can do so or not must be settled not by an 
appeal to the imagination but by an appeal to 
experience. Our inability to answer the question, 
How can the sun attract the earth, is not gen- 
erally held to make it impossible for the sun actu- 
ally to do so. Likewise in dealing with body and 
mind, our question is not how one acts upon the other, 
but the simpler question, Do the two seem to be re- 
lated in such fashion that certain bodily events are 
regularly followed by certain mind events, and cer- 
tain mind events by certain bodily events? Prior to 
the appeal to experience, the a priori denial of the 
possibility of such causal relation is pure dogma. 

What, then, has experience — experience rather 

1 "On the Notion of Cause" in "Mysticism and Logic/' p. 180. 






INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 139 

than theory — to say on this matter? If I am not tre- 
mendously mistaken, experience speaks here in no 
uncertain terms. And I refer to the simplest and 
commonest experiences of every day. If the elec- 
tricity were suddenly turned off from this room, our 
visual sensations would all cease; if it were turned 
on again they would immediately return. And this 
experiment could be repeated endlessly with invaria- 
bly the same result. Here, surely, we seem to 
have a case of invariable sequence if it is 
to be found anywhere, the physical change being 
regularly followed by the psychical change. Nor 
is regularity any more difficult to find in the 
reverse direction. I will to raise my hand and 
my hand rises; and this experiment and innumera- 
ble others like it can be repeated as long as 
the skeptical investigator wishes to stay and watch 
it. Surely if we are to be persuaded that physical 
stimuli have nothing to do with the production of 
sensations, or that will actions have nothing to do 
with the movements of our muscles, the persuader 
must rely upon something else than an appeal to 
experience. There seems, in fact, something almost 
perverse in the assertion, so popular in certain nat- 
uralistic circles, that the principle of simplicity de- 



140 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

mands that we explain human conduct without any 
reference to the conscious thoughts and purposes 
which so indubitably and so obviously precede or 
accompany it. There they are, ready at hand as a 
means of explanation, and without them the activities 
of human beings are notoriously inexplicable. As 
Becher has put it in his work "Gehirn und Seele" if 
an astronomer finds an irregularity in the motion of 
a known star which he cannot explain, he assumes 
an unknown factor; but if another star whose influ- 
ence has not yet been reckoned in is present, the 
astronomer is not prevented from bringing it into his 
calculation by any "principle of simplicity." 

It is, moreover, not without significance that the 
very concept of causation is undoubtedly derived 
from the experience of individuals as active agents. 
This was not Hume's view to be sure; in his opinion 
it was the observation of many repetitions of a given 
sequence from which comes the notion of causation. 
But on this point modern psychology finds Hume's 
analysis quite inadequate and unpersuasive. In the 
words of Professor Ladd, "What we all do actually 
experience in trying to get a lifelike idea of the mean- 
ing of our judgment C A is the cause of B' is the 
process of mentally representing our own experience 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 141 

whenever self-conscious causation with its feeling of 
effort is followed by observed changes in our presen- 
tations of sense in a regular way." x "Only as being 
ourselves self-conscious agents and sufferers do we 
come to argue about 'energy' and 'causation' in the 
world of things." 2 "Were it not for the experience 
cf mind as self-active and yet as dependent upon 
bodily changes for its particular experiences, and of 
the body as dependent for its particular changes upon 
states of mind, we should never have any conception 
of causation, or any so-called scientific principle of 
causation, or any law of the conservation and cor- 
relation of energy, or even any dispute as to whether 
the notion of causation applies properly to the rela- 
tions of mind and body. Causality is most originally 
and concretely an experience of relations between 
body and mind." 3 Time permits no longer quotation 
from Professor Ladd's admirable psychological dis- 
cussion of this matter, but I commend to all those 
who have not read it his lucid exposition 4 of the 
absurdity of those who would forbid us to apply 
to the activity of mind a concept which is ultimately 



1 "Philosophy of Mind," p. 220. 

2 Op. cit., p. 222. 

3 Op. cit., p. 234. 

4 Op. cit., pp. 218-36. 



142 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

derived wholly from our experience of that activ- 
ity. 

There is therefore nothing in the nature of causa- 
tion inconsistent with the view that mind and body 
act on each other ; and experience would seem to indi- 
cate that such causal interaction is one of the com- 
monest things observable. The first accusation 
against Interaction falls, therefore, to the ground. 
The second accusation raised against it, however, is 
much more difficult to deny, namely that the inter- 
action of mind and body is incompatible with the 
principle of the conservation of energy. In consider- 
ing this question it is necessary to be as clear as we 
can as to the meaning of this famous physical prin- 
ciple. As Wundt and Busse have pointed out, there 
are two theories which go under this name, and which, 
while closely related, are by no means identical. 
One of these deals only with transformations and 
may be phrased as follows: "When kinetic energy is 
changed into some other form and this in turn is 
changed back again into the kinetic form, the amount 
that is now restored is equal to that which was given 
up." x This dictum we may call the Theory of Equiv- 



1 Stumpfs formulation, in his "Eroffnungsrede des Interna- 
tionalen Kongressus fur Psychologic" (Miinchen, 1908), p. 9. 






INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 143 

alence. Taken in this sense plainly the principle of 
the conservation of energy need not be inconsistent 
with Interaction. It would, no doubt, demand a par- 
ticular formulation of the Interaction Theory — one 
that should maintain that the amount of physical 
energy destroyed when body influences mind is ulti- 
mately exactly made good by the amount created 
when mind influences body. This condition might 
bring certain odd characteristics into the Interaction 
Theory. But the interaction part of it would remain 
intact. 

It is rather more difficult to make Interaction 
compatible with the other form of the principle o 
conservation. This form — the more popular of w 
two — insists that the amount of energy in the uni- 
verse is always fixed and constant, — the Constancy 
Theory we may, therefore, call it. The difficulty oL 
harmonizing Interaction with this theory is evident. 
If no energy can ever be created or destroyed how 
can the physical energy of the brain affect the mind, 
and how can the mind ever affect the brain? Should 
we not have in the one case the destruction, in the 
other the creation of energy? 

Several ways out of the difficulty have been sug- 
gested, but none of them is altogether satisfactory. 



iW 



144 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

Professor Stumpf proposes the view 1 that the phys- 
ical stimulus might cause sensation without the 
expenditure of any energy, all its energy going into 
the changed condition of the brain; and that in like 
manner a volition might be one of two co-causes of 
a motor response , the other co-cause being the corre- 
lated brain activity which should furnish all the 
energy, the volition contributing none. The first of 
these proposals makes the causal action of the brain 
upon the mind very anomalous, though not incon- 
ceivable. The second has much greater difficulties; 
for either the physical co-cause, which contributes 
all the energy, wholly determines the motor event or 
it does not. If it does wholly determine it, then the 
psychical co-cause — the volition — is not really a co- 
cause at all. If the physical co-cause does not 
wholly determine the event but is thwarted and its 
natural working is modified by the volition, then the 
volition is doing something for which energy is regu- 
larly needed; and either it must itself be a form of 
energy or else it must create energy. To assert that 
it performs what a physical thing must have energy 
in order to do, and yet to deny that it is either a 
form or a creator of energy, is to get out of a diffi- 

1 "Eroffnungsrede." 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 145 

culty in a purely verbal fashion. It is, in fact, im- 
possible to hold this view unless we regard conscious- 
ness as a form of energy or a creator of it. Similar 
difficulties await the other proposed reconciliations. 
Thus Wentscher, Wundt, and others have suggested 
that mind might prevent or delay the transforma- 
tion of potential energy into kinetic and so affect 
very considerably the processes of the brain; and 
yet the amount of energy at the end of the operation 
would equal that at the beginning. Others have 
proposed that mind might intervene to change the 
direction of motion in brain molecules without alter- 
ing either the mass or the acceleration, and thus 
neither increase nor decrease the amount of energy 
in the moving molecule. But it must be remem- 
bered that energy would be required to do this, and 
unless the mind itself be a form of energy it could 
do this only by creating at least an equivalent to 
the amount of energy that would be required of a 
physical thing to make the same change in direc- 
tion. 1 All these proposals, it will be remarked, are 
quite invalid unless we regard mind as itself a form 
of energy; and the suggestion that we should frankly 
make this supposition was, in fact, put forward by 

1 The same objection holds of Maxwell's "demon." 



146 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

Professor Stumpf in his famous address in support 
of Interaction at the Congress for Psychology at 
Munich in 1896. 

And indeed, when one considers the matter, the 
proposition does not seem altogether impossible. It 
may, of course, be put in a way that would seem 
to have most of the disadvantages of Materialism; * 
but it may also be expressed in terms that will avoid 
at least the most obvious of the materialist's difficul- 
ties. For it is not necessary to assert that mind as 
such is identical with energy as such ; one need only 
maintain that mind is one of those things that possess 
energy. If mind be taken in this sense it is quite 
possible to reconcile Interaction with the principle of 
conservation. For what is energy according to the 
physicists? When they leave their equations and 
speak of energy as something real — as indeed they 
must do when they speak of it as constant in amount 
— they can define it only as the ability to do work, 
or to exert influence upon the acceleration of mass 
or upon the distance through which a mass is moved. 
Now that mind has the ability to do work and to 



1 This, in fact, was our criticism of Prof. Montague's identifica- 
tion of mind with potential energy. With a little modification, how- 
ever, Prof. Montague's theory might be made over from Material- 
ism into a form of Interaction. 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 147 

exert influence upon the molecules and masses of 
the brain is exactly the contention of Interaction. 
And there is nothing in the theory of the constancy 
of energy incompatible with this view provided we 
assert that the sum total of energy in the universe, 
kinetic and potential, possessed by physical systems 
and by minds, is constant. 

While the upholder of the conservation of energy, 
however, may be induced in the manner suggested 
to compromise with the interactionist, it is very ques- 
tionable whether the interactionist on his part will 
care to make the compromise. For if the sum total 
of the energy of the universe, in minds and in matter, 
be constant, then the amount at the disposal of each 
mind will be absolutely definite and absolutely lim- 
ited and it will be quite impossible for the mind to 
create any new energy. The amount of energy 
which the mind possesses, moreover, will be deter- 
mined almost or quite entirely by the amount it has 
received from matter, and it will be able to give out 
only so much as it has received. Thus mind, instead 
of being a genuine source of creative energy or a real 
power in the control of it, will be merely a kind of 
passive reservoir for its temporary storage or a chan- 
nel for its flow. Such a view would not be incon- 



148 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

sistent with Interaction and one might work out on 
the basis of it, as Stumpf suggests, "a psycho-physi- 
cal mechanics which should fit spiritual events into 
the universal causal organization of the world." s 
But I doubt whether this bringing of mechanics into 
the soul will be acceptable to many interactionists. 
In such a partnership between the mechanical and the 
spiritual I fear the mechanical would always control 
the decisive vote, and thus we should have on our 
hands again the old materialistic difficulties as to 
the efficiency of consciousness. So far as I can see, 
the only way in which the efficiency of consciousness 
can be preserved is by insisting upon the creative 
power of the mind. If it — it and not merely some- 
thing of which it is the channel — is to have genuine 
influence upon conduct, it must be an originator of 
action absolutely undetermined by the laws of energy, 
it must be able to make something that is new. It 
is hard to see how it can do this unless it be a 
genuine creator of energy. 

My personal conclusion is, therefore, that Inter- 
action, in the sense in which it is really of importance, 
is not compatible with the theory of the constancy 
of energy. The two are antithetical. What must we 

1 Op. cit, p. 19. 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 149 

conclude from this? That Interaction is therefore 
impossible? Perhaps so. Yet before doing this we 
must, if our method is to be logical or scientific, first 
ask how we know that the theory of the constancy of 
energy in the universe is true. If this theory is 
demonstrable, plainly it must be demonstrated, like 
everything else, in one of three ways. Either it must 
be a necessary logical truth, or it must be an observa- 
ble fact, or it must be a law deducible empirically 
from the sum total of observed and relevant facts. 
In which of these three ways has the law of the con- 
servation of energy (in the sense of constancy) been 
demonstrated? Certainly not in the first sense nor 
in the second. Not its most enthusiastic propounder 
would seriously maintain either that it is a neces- 
sary law of thought or that it is capable of verifica- 
tion by direct observation. It must, therefore, if 
demonstrable, rest upon induction, it must be empiri- 
cally verifiable. 

Where shall we look for this empirical verification? 
How shall we prove that in the relations between 
mind and matter no energy is ever created or de- 
stroyed? Within the inorganic world the amount of 
energy may well be constant. This indeed has never 
been proved and probably never will be. It is a 



150 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

postulate; but it is one that we are probably all will- 
ing to make. But the question of the universal appli- 
cation of the theory to the inorganic world is not 
the question we are talking about. What evidence 
is there that it applies also to conscious and reason- 
ing beings? So far as I am aware, only one serious 
attempt has been made to test its applicability to 
men — an experiment, namely, carried out between 
1900 and 1902 by Drs. Atwater and Benedict under 
the auspices of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. 1 
The total income and the total outgo of energy in the 
bodies of several young men were exactly measured, 
with the result that, expressed in calories, the income 
and outgo never indeed balanced each other exactly, 
but came fairly near to doing so. Sometimes one was 
in excess, sometimes the other, the net outgo vary- 
ing from 165 calories below the net income to 195 
calories above it. If all the experiments are lumped, 
income and outgo vary by less than one-fifth of one 
per cent. Now, if Interaction be true how should we 
expect such a series of experiments as these to turn 
out? Consider: the weight of the brain is about 
one-fortieth or one-fiftieth of the weight of the 



1 Reported ia Bulletin No. 136 of the Department of Agriculture, 
Office of Experiment Stations, Washington, 1903. 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 151 

body, and the part of the brain that is supposed to 
be in direct relation to consciousness is a small frac- 
tion of this. Every theory of Interaction which sug- 
gests details, moreover, proposes that the action of 
the mind on the brain consists in only such very 
slight creation or use of energy as should be neces- 
sary to change the direction of moving molecules or 
delay for a few seconds the transition of potential 
energy into kinetic; and that the action of brain on 
mind involves an equally minute amount of energy. 
Our interactionist, therefore, in spite of his denial 
of the universality of the conservation of energy, 
would have expected the differences in income and 
outgo in Dr. Atwater's experiments to be just about 
what they were, or possibly even slighter. It is of 
course possible to postulate that the difference found 
was altogether due to error and that as a fact income 
and outgo were exactly balanced. Even had this 
been the case, however, it would have been perfectly 
compatible with Interaction; for (especially under 
conditions such as those of the experiments) it is 
quite conceivable that the amounts of energy 
absorbed and created by the mind should balance 
each other. The outcome of the experiment therefore 
is quite as much in favor of Interaction as against it, 



152 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

and proves nothing whatever as to the applicability 
of the conservation of energy to conscious beings. 

The only possible conclusion from the facts thus 
far considered is that there is absolutely no reason 
of either an a priori or an empirical kind for main- 
taining the universal applicability of the theory of 
the conservation of energy. The only argument in 
favor of such a view is the argument from analogy 
that since the theory holds in the inorganic world 
therefore it must hold in the organic and conscious 
world. In other words, it is part of the general view 
that not only the conservation of energy but all the 
laws of physics and chemistry must have absolute 
and unmodified application to the whole material 
world and that they can never be interfered with by 
anything else. It was the necessary denial of this 
universal applicability, it will be remembered, that 
formed the chief difficulty of Interaction. Here, 
then, we have the decisive issue in its most crucial 
form: Can mind ever modify the action and outcome 
of physical laws? 

This is a question of tremendous importance and 
we should make every effort to approach it fairly; 
we should also, I am inclined to think, do our best 
to prove the universality of physical law if that be 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 153 

possible. It would be a very weak defense of such 
a view to put our argument in the form of analogy; 
to say that the organic and conscious world must 
be analogous to the inorganic; for that is the very 
thing to be proved. We shall make a better showing 
for the mechanical view if we divide our argument 
into two heads, — an a priori and an a posteriori. Our 
a priori argument will then run as follows. It is 
generally admitted that the laws of physics and chem- 
istry have unobstructed control over all movements 
and changes in the inorganic world; is it not there- 
fore extremely improbable that the tiny realm of 
organic matter — or the much tinier realm of matter 
constituting the bodies of reasoning beings — should 
resist this dominance and form an exception to an 
otherwise universal law? 

In attempting to give a serious answer to a ques- 
tion concerning probability it is necessary to know 
whether that question be asked in the light of experi- 
ence or prior to all experience. If we ask what, 
prior to all experience, would be the probable situa- 
tion, we see plainly that there is no possible answer 
to our question — prior to experience one answer is 
quite as probable as another. The only question as 
to probability that will have any real meaning must 



154 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

therefore be this: In the light of all our actual experi- 
ence is it or is it not probable that those laws which 
hold absolutely for the non-organic world hold also 
and with equal absoluteness for the organic and con- 
scious world? The question of probability is there- 
fore just the old question of facts and of their inter- 
pretation. The upholders of the view that the physi- 
cal laws of the brain completely determine the action 
of the mind will refer us to such things as reflex 
action and habit in normal beings, to the localiza- 
tion of function and the phenomena of aphasia. But 
plainly the first two of these are perfectly consistent 
with a view which, like Interaction, agrees that the 
body is a machine but insists that it is a machine 
which to some extent is run by the mind. And as 
to aphasia, though there is no time for even a cursory 
treatment of the subject, let me remind you that 
while the earliest investigations of the disease by 
Broca, Wernicke, and their contemporaries made it 
appear that memories were stored up in definite brain 
centers and that memory and presumably thought 
were altogether dependent upon particular cerebral 
structures, the most recent work upon the subject 
has quite upset this entire theory. The whole ques- 
tion is in many ways still vague and unsettled, but 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 155 

the three following points seem pretty well estab- 
lished. Firstly, memory images are not stored up in 
particular parts of the brain. 1 Upon this the lead- 
ing authorities are agreed; definite memories seem 
to be created by the mind and to be conditioned 
upon some general type of brain set such as that 
which Bergson suggests in his interactionist hypo- 
thesis. 2 Secondly, even when no images can be 
formed it is still possible for the patient to think, to 
mean, to will. He may be unable to get the meaning 
of others, because he has forgotten their language; 
but he is still very conscious of his own meaning 
and his own wishes and able to cling persistently to 
a definite purpose even though unable to put the 
purpose into words. He seems, in short, to be in- 
tensely conscious, yet without definite images or 
symbols. 3 Thirdly, by persistent activity of the will 
much of the language loss in aphasia may be regained 
through a laborious process of reeducation. 4 Presum- 



1 Cf. Head, "Aphasia and Kindred Disorders," Brain, for July, 
1920; and Franz, "Cerebral Mental Relations," Pschol. Review for 
March, 1921. 

2 "Matter and Memory," passim. Cf. also the essay on "The 
Soul and the Body," in "Mind-Energy." 

3 See in particular the "Memoires du Medecin Aphasique" in the 
Archives de Psychologie for May, 1918. 

4 Almost every work on aphasia shows this. Cf ., for example, 
Prof. Franz's "Presidential Address on Cerebral-Mental Relations" 
already referred to. 



156 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ably this means the training of new centers to do the 
work of those destroyed by the original lesion. In 
any case it seems to indicate clearly the activity of 
the mind. 

So far, then, as I am aware, there is absolutely no 
experimental or empirical evidence of any kind 
which gives any support whatever to the denial of the 
mind's power to modify the workings of the laws of 
physics and chemistry. On the other hand, we have 
the unhesitating and universal testimony of every 
unspoiled individual consciousness, and the equally 
unquestionable evidence of everyday experience that 
mind can and does determine conduct. The very 
structure of the nervous system as an organization 
of forces in unstable equilibrium, 1 and the nature of 
consciousness as ever tending toward action and al- 
ways interested in it indicate, as our greatest psychol- 
ogist pointed out, the same conclusion. In the words 
of Professor James, "it is quite inconceivable that 
consciousness should have nothing to do with a busi- 
ness which it so faithfully attends." 2 Moreover, as 
I have so often repeated, to insist that mechanical 
laws completely determine all the actions of the 



1 Cf. James, "Principles of Psychology," Vol. I, pp. 139-42. 

2 Ibid., p. 136. 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 157 

human brain and the human body just as they deter- 
mine the processes of the inorganic world, is to accept 
the responsibility of explaining the whole of every 
individual's conduct and the whole of human history 
with no reference to thought, purpose, or feeling. 

To prove the truth or the probability of such a 
view would require most serious considerations and 
most cogent reasons. But, as I think we have suf- 
ficiently seen, the upholders of this position have not 
a single relevant empirical fact to rely upon, and not 
an argument to appeal to, unless it be that of a thor- 
oughly question-begging analogy. 

Instead of arguments we are presented with mo- 
tives. These motives are two in number. The less 
important is self-defensive in form. We are told that 
the belief in the universality of physical law is a 
postulate necessary for natural science, and that if 
it be denied the whole of natural science w r ill come 
tumbling down, its very foundations having been de- 
stroyed. But what nonsense is this! If we refuse 
to admit that the laws which control inorganic matter 
also absolutely dominate that small portion of the 
material world in which matter comes into relation 
with personality, how many of the claims of physical 
science will thereby be undermined? In the whole 



158 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

realm of physics and of chemistry, of astronomy and 
geology, not one. Mechanical science will be forced 
to give up its claims to absolute sway only in that tiny 
realm where personality, or perhaps where life, be- 
gins to have influence. In this connection it is inter- 
esting to note that the demand for the absolute uni- 
versality of physical laws comes, as a rule, not from 
the physicists, not from the chemists, but from a 
small number of biologists, a larger number of psy- 
chologists, and most of all from the naturalistic school 
of the philosophers. The mechanistic philosophers 
are much more royalist than their king, and the de- 
mand for the universal sway of the mechanical seems 
to vary directly with the square of the distance from 
headquarters. 

The other motive which prompts Naturalism in its 
attempt to deny the efficiency of mind is of a more 
positive and ambitious sort. It is, namely, the desire 
to make all forms of matter, of motion, and of energy 
susceptible to the same sort of description, explana- 
tion, and prediction; the wish to get a single world 
formula under which everything that happens may 
be subsumed. "We have achieved the impersonal 
point of view," hymns one of the most ecstatic of 
the behaviorists, "in the interpretation of stars and 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 159 

stones and trees and bacteria and guinea pigs. Our 
next step is to achieve it for the phenomena of 
human behavior." 1 Thus shall we at length achieve 
that consummation devoutly to be wished, that thor- 
oughly scientific point of view, from which we shall 
be unable to find in man anything essentially differ- 
ent from what we observe in stones, bacteria, and 
guinea pigs. There is, to be sure, absolutely no evi- 
dence to show that such an achievement is possible, 
no argument to indicate that the actual world is 
such as to submit to such a formula; but the great 
longing heart of Naturalism demands that it shall 
be so, and the naturalistic philosopher solemnly de- 
clares that it is so — it is so because it must be so. 
It would be impossible to find in the most sentimental 
and unreasoning forms of religious experience a more 
extreme case of the pious wish or the Will to Believe. 
Nor can the annals of Scholastic Philosophy or of 
Protestant Theology give us a more admirable ex- 
ample of dogma, pure and undefiled. No evidence 
that Galileo could give as to the motion of the earth 
had any influence upon his judges; the earth did not 
move because it could not move. In similar fashion 



X H. Heath Bawden, "The Presuppositions of a Behavior-ist," 
Psychol. Rev., XXV (1918), pp. 173-74. 



160 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

we are assured that the mind cannot move nor in- 
fluence the movements of the body — to say that it 
does so is heresy, for so one would deny the univer- 
sality of physical law. — E pur si muove! 

Here is the real issue of the mind-body problem, 
here is the only important question. And looking 
back over our course with this fact in mind we can 
now see that there are not, as we had supposed, three 
or four chief views of this problem, but only two, 
namely Interaction and its rivals. The various forms 
of Materialism, of Parallelism, and of Behaviorism 
are only different ways of saying pretty much the 
same thing, only varied attempts to prove the same 
thesis. The aim of all is identical, namely, to write 
down and explain the whole of reality in physical 
formulae, to deny to mind any influence whether 
direct or indirect upon matter and motion. The 
first expression of this naturalistic thesis is the blat- 
ant form of Materialism. The difficulties to which 
this gives rise are too patent to permit of its accept- 
ance, so they are later disguised under the gentle- 
manly costume and the idealistic mask of Parallelism. 
But the splendid promises of Parallelism lead to dis- 
illusion at the end, and the mask which it wore is 
easily torn from its face. No one weeps its fall, for 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 161 

few besides Fechner and Paulsen were ever very 
much interested in it except as a means of defeating 
Interaction and establishing Naturalism. So its old 
upholders rapidly desert it to give in their allegiance 
to Behaviorism. Behaviorism, also, would like to 
avoid the blatancy of Materialism. It has many 
brave words as to the nobility and the significance 
of intelligence. But when we get at the real meaning 
of the words we learn that intelligence is simply a 
specific form of activity and set in nerves, muscles, 
and glands. Thus, Behaviorism, in common with its 
predecessors and allies, is merely a specially devised 
way of denying the efficiency of consciousness. 

And when one stops to face squarely this propo- 
sition that mind has no effect on conduct, — when, I 
say, one stops to face it squarely, and leaving aside 
pet theories, gives it serious consideration in the light 
of all that one knows of oneself and of other men 
and of human history and civilization — the proposi- 
tion reveals itself to the steady gaze as unspeakably 
preposterous. In the words of Professor Lovejoy, 
"Never, surely, did a sillier or more self-stultifying 
idea enter the human mind than the idea that think- 
ing as such — that is to say, remembering, planning, 
reasoning, forecasting, — is a vast irrelevancy having 



162 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

no part in the causation of man's behavior or in the 
shaping of his fortunes — a mysterious redundancy in 
the cosmos which would follow precisely the same 
course without it." 1 

We are told we must deny the efficiency of con- 
sciousness because of the difficulty in believing in any 
exceptions to the action of mechanical law and the 
difficulty of imagining how mind can act on matter. 
I submit that to be so nice with little difficulties, and 
so omnivorous with monstrosities that approach the 
mentally impossible is a case of straining at one poor 
gnat and swallowing a whole caravan of camels. 
Like others I find it difficult to imagine an idea 
affecting a brain molecule; but I think I am also 
like nearly everybody else when I find it impossible 
to believe that thought and purpose have had nothing 
to do with building up human civilization and creat- 
ing human literature and philosophy. How the op- 
ponents of Interaction manage to believe these 
things I confess I find it very difficult indeed to 
imagine. 

I know this is not decisive. I know indeed what 
the upholder of Naturalism will probably reply. His 

1 "Pragmatism as Interactionism," Jour, of Phil, XVII (1920), 
p. 632. 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 163 

reply, in fact, will be in substance not very different 
from that of the Red Queen to Alice, after Alice had 
told her there were some things she couldn't believe. 
"Can't you?" said the Queen in a pitying tone. "Try 
again; draw a long breath and shut your eyes." 

"There's no use trying," said Alice, "one can't 
believe impossible things." 

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said 
the Queen. "When I was your age I always did it 
for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've be- 
lieved as many as six impossible things before break- 
fast." 

When one remembers the materialistic assertions 
that consciousness is matter and that logic is ground 
out by mechanical processes, the parallelistic thesis 
that the non-existent brain determines wholly the 
existent mind, the neo-realist denial of all reality to 
the subjective, the behaviorist identification of 
thought with the action of the larynx, one sees that 
Naturalism, like the Red Queen, has had some prac- 
tice in believing the impossible; that in fact it would 
be stating its case with great moderation, not to say 
modesty, if it should claim that sometimes it had be- 
lieved as many as half a dozen impossible things be- 
fore breakfast. Moreover, the Red Queen's formula 



164 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

for belief is the one which must necessarily be 
adopted if we are to imitate successfully the remarka- 
ble achievements of Naturalism in the arousal of 
faith in the impossible, — namely, "Draw a long 
breath and shut your eyes!" 

I too can believe a good many things with my 
eyes shut; but if I keep them persistently open I 
become less and less impressed with the ambitious 
claims and the false dignity of Naturalism. And 
by Naturalism I mean, of course, not natural science 
but the unempirical philosophy, the a priori theory, 
which would extend the formulae of natural science 
into spheres in which the true scientist has no ambi- 
tion to advance. Taken in this sense Naturalism ap- 
pears to me the great hoax of our times. Its seem- 
ingly adamantine fortifications, with their tremen- 
dous and terrifying guns, are mostly camouflage. Its 
walls are enormously impressive; but like those of 
Jericho they will fall before whosoever has the cour- 
age coolly to examine their foundations — and to blow 
upon the trumpet. 

This being the case, I must also say frankly that 
Interaction seems to me the inevitable outcome of 
our argument. It is the only view that makes his- 
tory and human life really intelligible. Indeed if we 



INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES 165 

were right in believing (and we have seen no reason 
for doubting it) that Materialism, Parallelism, Inter- 
action, and the denial of the mind-body relation are 
the only answers to our problem worth serious con- 
sideration; and if we were justified also in our con- 
clusion that the relation is a real one, and that 
neither Materialism nor Parallelism is tenable, and 
that the alleged difficulties of Interaction are much 
slighter than at first they seem, it follows that we 
are plainly compelled by the very process of elimi- 
nation to conclude that Interaction is the true doc- 
trine and that mind has an independence and a power 
of its own. And now we can begin to understand 
the wild attempts of Materialism, Parallelism, Neo- 
Realism, and Behaviorism to invent some method by 
which Interaction might be avoided. Not for nothing 
were the strange twistings and writhings of these 
theories. For if Interaction be accepted a momentous 
turn has been taken in our philosophy. We shall 
namely have given in our assent to a Dualism of 
Process within the universe. 

The consequences of such a Dualism of Process 
are fateful and endless. There is no time to deal 
with them this afternoon and they must be postponed 
for consideration to our final lecture. But we can, 



166 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

I think, already begin to form some notion of what 
is involved in this Dualism of Process, to which, by 
the force of logic and of experience, we seem to have 
been driven. Such a world view will mean a pro- 
found, if not a fundamental, distinction between mat- 
ter and spirit. It will mean the return of all sorts 
of possibilities against which the iron gates of Natu- 
ralism were forever closed. It will mean that per- 
haps Plato and Christianity were right after all. 



LECTURE V 

A DUALISM OF PROCESS 

The preceding four lectures formed one consecu- 
tive argument as to the nature of the relation be- 
tween mind and body. The outcome of that argu- 
ment may be put in negative terms as follows: None 
of the theories opposed to Interaction are tenable, 
and none of the objections to Interaction are impor- 
tant. From this outcome we seemed to be justified 
in drawing the conclusion that Interaction is the 
true solution of the mind-body problem. Personally 
I think this is a solution from which there is no 
escape. It is a solution, moreover, that is pregnant 
with decisive consequences for our whole view of 
life and of religion; as, indeed, I hope to show in our 
next lecture. Before turning to this rather alluring 
field, however, we must face one more difficult and 
crucial question; namely this: If Interaction be true, 
what are they that interact? 

A verbal answer to this question is of course simple 
enough and ready at our hand. It is an easy thing 
to say that mind and matter interact. The interpre- 

167 



168 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

tation of each of these terms, however, has been the 
subject of volumes of learned disquisition and keen 
critique. Fortunately one of these terms, namely 
matter, need cause us little concern. Whether we in- 
terpret it realistically or idealistically will have little 
bearing on the more pragmatic questions of life and 
religion or on the philosophical position with which 
I am chiefly concerned. The interpretation of the 
other term of the interaction relation, namely 
"mind," is very much more crucial in its bearings 
upon life's values. In spite, therefore, of the brief- 
ness of our time we must now face the important 
question: What is it that interacts with matter? 

Roughly speaking, there are three types of answer 
to this question. One of them is that it is conscious- 
ness, the passing stream or pulse of consciousness, 
which is affected by the neural stimulus and which 
in its turn affects the motor discharge. This answer 
has the merit of simplicity and the merit of trying to 
stick closely to the facts. But a little reflection, as 
it seems to me, will show it to be plainly inadequate. 
If only sensation and impulse were involved, this 
view, which sees in mind merely a succession of 
more or less distinct, not to say unrelated, psychic 
states, would be ample and its simplicity would there- 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 169 

fore recommend it as the most acceptable hypothesis. 
But the most significant part of the mind-body rela- 
tion is the activity of mind as consciousness in guiding 
and determining purposeful conduct. It would be 
very difficult to believe that passing psychic states 
can account for conduct. Human action is of course 
all too often the outcome of mere impulse, but at 
times also — and very commonly — it is the outcome 
of long nourished purposes and firmly grounded 
character. To fail to recognize this fact and the 
consequent insufficiency of mere successive psychic 
pulses as an explanation, is to fail to realize the dif- 
ference between the man and the invertebrate. The 
mind that determines human conduct has in it some- 
thing more durable and more substantial than any 
transitory state of consciousness. 

Closely related to the view just criticized is the 
suggestion made independently by James and by 
Bergson, to the effect that consciousness in itself is 
non-personal, that it exists primarily in a kind of 
cosmic center or reservoir, and that it showers down 
upon us from its celestial source and becomes sepa- 
rated and differentiated into the forms we know as 
personal conscious centers through the action of the 
brain. Our brains are thus "organs for separating 



170 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

it into parts and giving them finite form." 1 The 
thought itself goes back of both James and Bergson 
at least as far as Shelley: the reader will remember 
the suggestive lines: 

"Life like a dome of many-colored glass 
Stains the white radiance of eternity." 

There is a magic in these verses which should make 
them immune to criticism. But it must be said that 
if they are to be interpreted in terms of the James- 
Bergson hypothesis, they are indeed still beautiful 
poetry but very questionable philosophy or psychol- 
ogy. James himself , it must be added, seems hardly 
in earnest with his own suggestion, — and indeed it is 
hard to see how he could be; for such a view is quite 
out of keeping with his regular empirical attitude, 
and it is, moreover, almost as defenseless before his 
own argument against the Mind-stuff Theory as is 
that theory itself. Nothing that we know of con- 
sciousness or of the universe gives us any reason for 
supposing the existence of such a reservoir of imper- 
sonal consciousness as seems to be implied in the 
hypothesis; nor is it easy to put any meaning into the 

1 James, "Human Immortality," Note, page 52. Bergson's view 
is presented in "Creative Evolution. " It must be added that his 
treatment of the subject in "Matter and Memory" has little in 
common with the view under discussion. 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 171 

assertion that the very personal thoughts and feel- 
ings and volitions which I find in my own experience 
are rays showering down upon me from some "vaster 
unity." Here as elsewhere "the essence of feeling 
is to be felt, and as a psychic existent feels so it must 
be." 

The thing that interacts with matter must, then, 
be something relatively individual and relatively per- 
manent if it is to account for experience as we actu- 
ally know it. These considerations, together with a 
hidden fear of some of the seeming difficulties con- 
sidered in our last lecture, and also the desire to con- 
form mind as closely as possible to the rest of the ex- 
istent universe, as well as the courteous wish to avoid 
all unnecessary offense to the susceptibilities of the 
naturalists, have led some interactionists to propose 
that mind should be interpreted as a kind of material 
substance, different, to be sure, in many ways from 
the matter which chemistry and physics study, but 
like it in having definite position and extension in 
space and apparently also in being part of the execu- 
tive order of the physical world. 1 The motives for 



1 Cf. Professor Sheldon's admirable Presidential Address at the 
Twenty-first Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Asso- 
ciation, published in the Philosophical Review, XXXI, pp. 103-34, 
esp. pp. 129-34. 



172 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

such a view are obvious and of course are natural 
enough. Personally they seem to me quite out- 
weighed by the equally obvious disadvantages, not to 
say dangers, of the proposal. To say that mind is 
matter, whether the matter be of the ordinary or of 
an extraordinary sort, is ultimately as meaningless 
in the mouth of an interactionist as in that of a 
materialist, and it is difficult to see where any solid 
advantages are to be found in so hazardous a propo- 
sition. It is not in any material realm that mind is 
to be found. What we mean by mind is surely 
something quite different from that. Why seek ye 
the living among the dead? 

Mind, therefore, is not to be identified either with 
any form of matter or with passing states of con- 
sciousness. Yet it must have at least a certain de- 
gree of persistence and substantiality in order to 
explain its control of conduct and all that we know 
as purpose and character. If so much must be ad- 
mitted I see no way of avoiding some form of the 
age-long view of philosophy and of common sense 
which would interpret mind in terms of self or per- 
sonality. Such a view is not popular to-day. Yet if 
Interaction be true it seems to me we must suppose 
that the reality which interacts with the brain is 






A DUALISM OF PROCESS 173 

some form of self which gets expression in the suc- 
cessive psychic states, which somehow owns these 
states and is to a great extent characterized by them, 
but which is not exhausted in them. It has been a 
common practice to prove the truth of Interaction 
by means of the existence of the self. The argu- 
ment, I think, runs as easily in the reverse direction 
Granted the truth of Interaction, the existence of the 
self is nearly or quite unavoidable. 

Nor, quite aside from Interaction, do I see how 
belief in a genuine self is to be avoided. The experi- 
ence of the philosopher and of the "plain man" alike 
testify unmistakably to the personal nature of con- 
sciousness. The special needs of psychology have 
compelled the psychologist to isolate various parts of 
the content of consciousness and to study them out of 
their total setting and in abstraction from those com- 
mon characteristics which they share with all the rest 
of our psychic content; and as a result the psychol- 
ogist has formed the habit of considering these things 
by themselves and of reconstructing the "stream 
of consciousness" out of them. Most of us brought 
up in scientific circles have borrowed the habit of the 
psychologist. Thus both the psychologists and the 
rest of us have to some extent obliterated our imme- 



174 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

diate self-knowledge, and for purposes of theory 
have set up in place of what we actually find a de- 
scription of consciousness which is frankly false and 
whose raison d'etre is the need of studying in arti- 
ficial isolation elements of consciousness which in 
reality are never isolated. But when from this arti- 
ficial construction we turn with a fresh glance to ob- 
serve our own conscious life we find that it is most 
emphatically not a succession of psychic pulsations 
but a series of our own changing states and objects. 
The only forms of consciousness we know anything 
about are personal, and with every psychic state 
there goes a reference, explicit or implicit, to a self 
which somehow owns or has these states, perceives 
these objects, acts and feels and knows in these voli- 
tions, emotions, and judgments. 

"If the self is only a multiplicity of psychic expe- 
riences/' writes Busse, "the manner and means by 
which this multiplicity gets put together into the 
unity of consciousness is not only, as Paulsen puts 
it, 'not further definable/ but unthinkable. ... A 
multiplicity remains under all circumstances what it 
it is, a multiplicity, a sum of elements somehow 
bound together. However grouped they remain ever 
a multiplicity and they melt into a single unified sub- 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 175 

ject as little as a number of separate personal con- 
sciousnesses can be melted into a single, unified con- 
sciousness." * 

The unity of consciousness to which reference is 
here made need not and should not be taken in any 
mysterious or transcendental sense. It is one of the 
simplest facts of every one's unspoiled observation. 
It does not mean a stark unity, incompatible with 
variety. It means that with all the changes in our 
thoughts and experiences we yet find ourselves one 
and identical. 

There is no time in this lecture for a discussion 
of the nature of the self. Even if there were I should 
despair of finding a complete definition for it. Our 
inability fully to define it is due in part to the fact 
that the self is primal in our experience and is sui 
generis. The physicists and the mathematicians have 
somewhat similar difficulties in defining their "first 
things." The more logical among them, in fact, have 
ceased to attempt to define them. In the case of 
the self, moreover, we have an additional difficulty. 
So strong in us men, and particularly in our primi- 
tive ancestors, has been the practical bent, directed 
toward the world of matter and motion in which our 

^■"Geist und Korper," pp. 326-27. 



176 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

lives as natural beings depend, that language, with all 
its terms of definition, has been formed on what we 
might call a material model. Hence the moment we 
try to define the self otherwise than by enumerating 
the things that it does, we are forced to make use 
of objective and quasi-material terms which defeat 
our very purpose. But if we cannot define the self, 
we can, like the mathematicians, exhibit it, point to 
it, indicate what we mean by it. In the words of a 
recent English writer, "We all realize what it is to 
be active — it is just living and doing. We all realize 
what a self is. This realization is far more than 
knowledge in the ordinary sense. ... It is a unique 
and supremely intimate fact, and therefore stands 
in a class of its own." 1 Moreover, in addition to 
this direct realization of the self, its reality may also 
be inferred from such things as knowledge, experi- 
ence, perception. For "without it they have no sig- 
nificance whatever. . . . We cannot speak simply 
of the existence of thoughts and feelings. There 
is always the implication of one who feels and 
thinks." 2 

I shall not seek, then, to furnish you with any 



1 Richardson, "Spiritual Pluralism," pp. 13-14. 

2 Ibid., p. 20. 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 177 

careful definition of self or personality, but simply 
point you to your own unspoiled intuition. By the 
self I shall mean that which has ideals and purposes, 
which wills and suffers and strives and knows. By 
defining it thus I am merely using the method by 
which we define and know most of the objects of 
our thought and action, — namely by the things which 
it does. That a thing is what it does has been a com- 
monplace of thought since the days of Aristotle. Nor 
can it be said that the self is a mere "that which" ; 
for the things that it does are not to be separated 
from it. It is by no means the unqualified blank 
substance of some of the scholastics, nor merely the 
pure perceiving subject of some of the idealists. Each 
self has its own very definite characteristics which 
are to be learned only empirically. Some of the 
characteristics shared by every self have been enu- 
merated by Professor Calkins. "First, the self of 
each of us to some extent persists. ... In the second 
place, the self with all its persistence truly changes, 
develops. . . . Third, and very significantly, I am 
a unique self; there is only one of me; I am an indi- 
vidual; no one, however closely she resembles me, is 
I. The possibility of this enumeration shows, in the 
fourth place, that I am a complex self, a unity of 



178 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

present with past, — yes, and with future, — self and a 
totality, also, of many different experiences; I am a 
perceiving and remembering and thinking and feel- 
ing self. These different experiences or aspects of me 
do not, however, exist apart from me ; I obviously am 
not what Hume called me, a bundle of perceptions, 
but each of the perceptions or emotions or thoughts 
is the expression of me who am inclusive of them. 
Finally, I am a self related to the world in which I 
seem to myself to be placed. . . . And these charac- 
ters, it must be added, are immediately experienced. 
The self, thus described, is observed and not merely 
inferred." * 

From this enumeration of some of the character- 
istics of the self it will be noted that the self is not 
to be confined within or found within any single 
moment and that its qualities are such as could not 
be attributed to any cross section of the stream of 
consciousness. One must take a longitudinal section 
of the time stream if one is to find the self. It is the 
sort of thing that changes and grows; change and 
growth are a part of its nature. Unlike things, 
whether material or physiological, and unlike what 



i'The Case of the Self Against the Soul," Psycholog. Rev., 
XXIV, pp. 279-80. 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 179 

theology sometimes teaches concerning God, the 
human self 

"partly is and wholly hopes to be." 

Each self is of course characterized by its present 
conscious state, but its present conscious state forms 
only a small portion of its nature. Much more impor- 
tant in making it what it is are its memories, tend- 
encies, sentiments, its purposes and ideals. These 
do not exist in the form of present consciousness. 
To make room, then, for the most significant portions 
of the personality or character we must have recourse 
to unconscious mental organization. If there be a 
self at all, character is surely a part of it, and char- 
acter is much more than consciousness. Any given 
passing conscious state is thus merely an aspect or 
activity of the self. The self may be called a center 
of psychic powers whose characteristics necessarily 
transcend any given section of conscious content or 
phase of conscious experience, and which are essen- 
tially inexhaustible by any passing moment. 

The reader will probably note in this discussion of 
the self, and indeed in a large part of this book, the 
close relation of my position to that of Professor 



180 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

McDougall, — a relation which at many points means 
an indebtedness which I am eager to acknowledge. 
It may not be out of place, therefore, to quote here 
his careful statement of the nature of the self or 
soul as he understands it, a statement that includes 
within it most of the things that I could wish to say 
and which have always seemed to me particularly 
enlightening. "We may describe a soul as a being 
that possesses, or is, the sum of definite capacities 
for psychical activity and pscho-physical interaction, 
of which the most fundamental are ( 1 ) the capacity 
of producing, in response to certain physical stimuli 
(the sensory processes of the brain), the whole range 
of sensation qualities in their whole range of intensi- 
ties; (2) the capacity of responding to certain sensa- 
tion-complexes with the production of meanings, as 
for example the spatial meanings; (3) the capacity 
of responding to these sensations and these meanings 
with feeling and conation or effort, under the spur 
of which further meanings may be brought to con- 
sciousness in accordance with the laws of reproduc- 
tion of similars and of reasoning; (4) the capacity 
of reacting upon the brain-processes to modify their 
course in a way which we cannot clearly define, but 
which we may provisionally conceive as a process of 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 181 

guidance by which streams of nervous energy may be 
concentrated in a way that antagonizes the tendency 
of all physical energy to dissipation and degrada- 
tion." x 

The self then is a genuine reality with a unity and 
identity of its own, a center of influence and energy, 
and not to be confounded with a mere sum of quali- 
ties or of states. In the words of Mr. John Laird, 
whose recent study of the "Problems of the Self" has 
gone into the matter with painstaking and critical 
judgment, "if anything has a right to be called a 
distinct particular thing, the soul has such a right 
preeminently. While the distinctions which we 
draw between things in the physical world are true 
and important, there seems to be no good reason, 
apart from momentary convenience, why we should 
fix on one boundary rather than another, and that is 
why scientific thought tends more toward a monism 
of matter. It is otherwise with the self. Despite the 
difficulties of personal identity, despite the fact that 
no self is a perfect or full-rounded whole, there is a 
greater independence and a more ultimate distinction 
between selves than between any other beings." 2 



1 "Body and Mind,* p. 5^5- 

2 Op. cit., pp. 362-63- 



182 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

One more empirical fact about the mind or self. 
To use Green's phrase, it has somehow become 
"organic to a body." Through this body it comes in 
touch with the material world; by means of this 
body it expresses itself. The body may in this sense 
be called the tool of the mind. The expression must 
be taken with a certain degree of caution. The rela- 
tions of mind and body are much more intimate and 
much more intricate than any of those existing be- 
tween the hand and its material tool. Yet compli- 
cated as are the relations between them, it still is true 
that the body is not the mind, and that it is used 
by the mind, and in this sense may not improperly 
be called its tool. Being limited in its expression to 
this one very wonderful but still imperfect tool, the 
mind must, to a considerable extent, submit to the 
laws of the tool. Moreover, we can study the activi- 
ties of the mind in objective and scientific fashion 
only through its bodily expressions. The inter- 
weavings of the mind with its physical mechanism are 
intricate in the extreme, so that it is often very diffi- 
cult to separate out the strands and say, This is of 
the mind and this is of the body. But though this 
is often very difficult I am not at all sure that it is al- 
ways impossible. The psycho-physical organism has, 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 183 

of course, a functional unity; but there is no justifica- 
tion for the conclusion so often drawn from this 
fact, that therefore analysis is impossible. It is at 
least conceivable that the really important psycho- 
logical discoveries of the future will consist quite as 
much in the sifting out of the purely physical from 
the purely spiritual features of psycho-physical life, 
and in exhibiting the exact ways in which the two 
are interdependent and cooperative, as in the field of 
measuring sensations and muscular responses which 
at present occupies so much of the time of our experi- 
mentalists. By this suggestion I do not mean to 
favor a return to the fruitless "rational psychology" 
of the pre-Kantians. The problems I have in mind 
should be and may well be investigated in purely 
empirical and scientific fashion. 

The view that I am here presenting is of course 
frankly dualistic. It is, however, a dualism of proc- 
ess and not necessarily of substance. It is as com- 
patible with Idealism as with Realism. So far as the 
mind-body problem is concerned, plainly there are 
many ways in which Idealism can easily adapt itself 
to Interaction. Thus Busse, 1 an enthusiastic idealist, 
holds that reality contains two kinds of beings — both 

lu Geist und Korper," pp. 170-73; also 475-82. 



184 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

to be taken idealistically — namely, things and souls. 
The difference between the two is this: that things 
affect perception and appear as occupying space; 
while souls, which are centers of consciousness, 
neither occupy space nor directly affect perception. 
The two kinds of beings mutually influence each 
other; yet there is no such invariable concomitance of 
psychical with spatial events as is called for by Par- 
allelism. On such a view the purely physical world 
of course would not be a complete and closed system, 
explicable by itself alone. But while physical nature 
would not be a complete Whole, Reality as such 
would be; it is not Idealism nor Monism but Natu- 
ralism that calls for unbroken mechanical explana- 
tion of all events in the physical world. Both In- 
teraction and the related Dualism of Process which 
I would defend are thus perfectly compatible with 
Idealism and even with a certain form of Idealistic 
Monism, a Monism namely that has room within 
it for conscious and active selves. 

What I mean by a Dualism of Process is now, I 
trust, plain enough. Whether reality is made up of 
one kind of stuff or whether there are two or more 
kinds of being within it, there are at any rate two 
kinds of laws, two kinds of processes to be found 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 185 

in the activities of the real beings of the world. 
Throughout the vast spaces of the physical universe 
where matter and energy come into no immediate re- 
lation with conscious persons, the laws of physics 
and chemistry have absolute sway. Here no energy 
is created or destroyed, regular mechanical sequence 
holds, and on the basis of the eternal physical laws 
and the actual configurations of matter and energy 
an omniscient mechanic could predict with unerring 
exactness the whole course of the future. But mat- 
ter and physical energy do not constitute the whole 
of reality. However it may be with the other planets 
and with the infinite starry host, here at any rate, 
upon this tiny sphere, this mote of earth, tracing its 
insignificant path through the immensities of space, 
there are beings who are not altogether subject to the 
laws of matter and motion. The beings we know as 
persons have their own ways of acting, their own 
"laws," if we insist on preserving the word and trans- 
ferring it to a new realm — ways of acting which are 
not reducible to physical laws. These personal beings 
have, as I said above, become "organic" to parts of 
the physical world. In the activities of the human 
body, therefore, the two forms of process, the two 
kiads of "law," meet. The result is both coopera- 



186 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

tion and conflict. Many of the activities of the body 
take place according to purely physical laws. But 
not all. The determining power in some of the acts 
of human bodies is to be found not in the physical 
and chemical processes but in processes of an utterly 
different nature, namely, those of the rational and 
purposive will. At many a juncture personal will, 
reason, purpose interfere with the working of 
mechanical law and contravene it. Of course the re- 
sulting action of the human body in question will be 
capable, after the fact, of being described in mechani- 
cal terms. But it was not caused by mechanical 
forces or conditions, it was not a part of any regular 
mechanical sequence, and it never could have been 
predicted by the most miraculously omniscient 
mechanist, even if he had been in possession of all 
the facts and all the laws of the physical universe. 

The question whether such a view is compatible 
with the evolutionary doctrine will be dependent for 
its answer upon the meaning one gives to evolution. 
If evolution be taken to mean a process of continual 
change in the time stream such that, at certain junc- 
tures, something genuinely new may arise, then evo- 
lution and the Dualism of Process are by no means 
incompatible. If, on the other hand, by evolution 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 187 

we mean a perpetual unrolling of the eternally given, 
such that each new stage was predictable from the 
preceding one, that no really new thing is possible, 
and that 

"With the first clay He did the last man make," 

then plainly we must choose between evolution and 
Dualism. They can hardly both be true. For con- 
scious selves and their ways of acting are different 
in kind from material things and their mechanical 
laws. The material world with its laws may precede 
and the world of selves may follow, but the material 
and mechanical world cannot out of its own resources, 
and acting in its own way, produce and give birth to 
the world of selves. Purely mechanical processes 
cannot account for that which is by definition non- 
mechanical. 

One must choose, then, between Dualism and 
mechanistic evolution. But more is involved in the 
choice than appears upon the surface. Thereby one 
must also choose between the efficiency of conscious- 
ness and the consequences of denying it which we 
have dwelt upon in the preceding lectures. One 
must choose between Interaction and its rivals. And 



188 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

I believe that even more than this is involved in the 
choice. One must, in the last analysis, choose be- 
tween a theory of knowledge which describes con- 
sciousness as we find it and makes possible our ref- 
erence to the distant, the future, and the past, and 
a theory which denies all such power of "transcend- 
ence," thus making knowledge unintelligible, and 
which is ultimately forced to identify consciousness 
with its objects or to reduce it to a mass of unrec- 
ognizable mind-dust. This is a serious indictment of 
mechanistic evolution, but I believe it is an inevitable 
one. For if the mind be actually capable of trans- 
cending itself in such fashion as it plainly seems to 
do in every judgment which it makes concerning the 
future and the past, it is altogether a different sort of 
being from all material things and its ways of acting 
are as far removed from mechanical causation and 
sequence as the heavens are above the earth. 

Nor am I alone in this view. I have the backing 
of two of the most considerable advocates of the evo- 
lutionary doctrine of mind, namely Professor Strong 
and Professor Dewey. In Professor Strong's opinion 
the enormous variety which we think we find in our 
conscious states and the great contrast between these 
states are enough, if really existent, to set the miod 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 189 

apart from material nature in such fashion as to make 
his own doctrine of the evolution of mind, and the 
origin of mind out of material nature, quite unthink- 
able. "No two things in nature/' he writes, "are 
more incomparable with each other or more incapable 
of reduction to each other than a color and a sound, 
or any two qualities of different senses; and two dif- 
ferent qualities of the same sense — as red and blue, 
or sweet and bitter, or hot and cold, — are only less 
incomparable and irreducible. If we were bound to 
take these qualities as really characterizing the feel- 
ings, if introspection spoke the last word in the mat- 
ter, no evolutionary theory could ever explain the 
origin of the feelings out of each other or out of any- 
thing simpler, but psychology would be perforce as 
unevolutionary as biology without the origin of 
species. That simple qualities shall not be ultimate, 
except as essences given to introspection, is then 
the sine qua non of evolutionary psychology." x 

In other words, according to Professor Strong, it 
is impossible to accept "evolutionary psychology," 
impossible, that is, to reduce mind to the category of 
physical things or to derive it from them, impossible, 
therefore, to avoid the dualism I am urging unless 

1 "Origin of Consciousness," p. 311. 



190 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

we deny to introspection all power of discerning the 
characters of our psychic states, deny that the quali- 
ties which we find in our feelings are really in them, 
and affirm that these feelings are in reality not at 
all as they feel but are a kind of mind-stuff whose 
nature we can hardly even guess. 

Professor Dewey attacks a related aspect of the 
problem of knowledge. If consciousness be subjec- 
tive, a different existent from its object, it is impos- 
sible to see how evolutionary psychology can account 
for it. He writes: "A belief in organic evolution 
which does not extend unreservedly to the way in 
which the subject of experience is thought of, and 
which does not strive to bring the entire theory of 
experience and knowing into line with biological and 
social facts, is hardly more than Pickwickian. There 
are many, for example, who hold that dreams, hallu- 
cinations, and errors cannot be accounted for at all 
except on the theory that a self (or 'consciousness') 
exercises a modifying influence upon the 'real object.' 
The logical assumption is that consciousness is out- 
side of the real object; that it is something different 
in kind, and therefore has the power of changing 
'reality' into appearance, of introducing 'relativities' 
into things as they are in themselves — in short of in- 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 191 

fecting real things with subjectivity. Such writers 
seem unaware of the fact that this assumption makes 
consciousness supernatural in the literal sense of the 
word." x 

The situation could hardly be better expressed. 
Unless we can somehow manage to identify con- 
sciousness with its object (as we have watched the 
pragmatists and neo-realists vainly trying to do) ; 
unless, that is, we can do away with consciousness in 
the usual sense altogether, then we must not only 
give up all hope of accounting for it by means of the 
physical processes of mechanical evolution, but we 
must frankly acknowledge that it is "supernatural 
in the literal sense of the word." That it is super- 
natural in exactly this literal sense is of course exactly 
the assertion of Dualism. If we use the word nature 
to mean those objects and those processes which are 
studied by the physical sciences, then consciousness 
and the conduct of persons are literally "supernat- 
ural." This does not mean that Dualism would split 
the world into two unrelated halves. The central 
thesis of Dualism, namely, Interaction, is an emphatic 
assertion that the parts of the universe are related. 
It cannot be too often repeated that the Dualism of 

1 ''Creative Intelligence," p. 3$. 



192 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

Process which I am upholding not only permits but 
emphasizes all that was important in Monism, 
namely, the conception of a world in which each 
part may or does interact with every other part. 
This Monism of Interaction, if so I may call the 
view I am defending, is not a monism of process and 
need not be one of substance, but it is a monism of 
mutual influence. Taken in this sense I trust that 
Dualism will have lost its terrors for you, as it has 
for me. Of course I recognize that the term dualist 
is an epithet of derision, but I trust we shall manage 
to endure it. In the words of Professor Stumpf , "To 
many this word seems so dreadful a reproach that 
they will in no case allow it to be settled upon them; 
the most painful confusion of thought is to them 
preferable to any form of Dualism. For my part, I 
find in it nothing so frightful, provided the unity 
of the world's interaction remains secured." * 

What I have said should make it plain that the 
dualistic philosophy is in no way hostile to or sus- 
picious of science. It is hostile only to the a priori 
claims of those who would push the domain of nat- 
ural science across the line where experience indi- 
cates that it ends. Toward natural science as such, 

1 "Rede zur Eroffnung des Internationale!! Kongressus," p. 30. 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 193 

as distinct from Naturalism, no philosophy is more 
favorable than Dualism. Instead of attempting to 
throw doubt upon the validity of the conclusions of 
physical science in the inorganic world as do some 
forms of Idealism and Panpsychism, Dualism would 
recognize there its unlimited sway. With the science 
of biology, whether it be of the mechanistic or of 
the vi talis tic type, Dualism refuses to quarrel. Nor 
can it be justly called hostile to psychology; though 
it certainly feels bound to utter a word of friendly 
warning when it sees psychologists claiming for their 
subject a status and nature inconsistent with the 
most obvious, fundamental, and important of its own 
data — a status which, could it be attained, would 
mean the destruction of psychology as a separate 
science and make it merely a "stop-gap for physiol- 
ogy.'' 

One final word on the relation of the dualistic 
view to philosophy. The serious consideration of 
Dualism and of what it suggests and involves would, 
in my opinion, bring about a healthful revival of 
philosophical interest, and lead contemporary 
thought out of some of the blind alleys in which it 
has been wasting its years, into fields more productive 
and into pathways more promising. Already, in fact, 



194 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

the current of philosophical interest and speculation 
seems to be turning. There is a notable revival of 
interest in the mind-body problem. The formulae of 
Parallelism which for so long soothed thought to sleep 
are now seen to be mostly verbal, and under the lead- 
ership of thinkers like Bergson in France, Driesch, 
Stumpf, and Busse in Germany, McDougall at Har- 
vard, Sheldon at Yale, Lovejoy at Hopkins, Interac- 
tion and all that it implies is being seriously studied 
and defended. No more hopeful point of attack 
upon the ultimate problems of metaphysics could be 
found than here, in the relation of mind and body: 
as I pointed out at the beginning of these lectures, 
the whole question of matter and spirit centers, as 
it were, within our very organisms. A study of this 
problem, therefore, and a serious consideration of 
Dualism and all that it involves could hardly fail to 
open up new and enticing vistas of investigation, 
fresh and fruitful problems for further study. The 
acceptance of Dualism means not the end but the 
beginning; it outlines for the philosopher and the 
psychologist new fields of research; it opens up before 
their eyes a view of reality that is not only more in 
accordance with experience, but richer in significant 
and vital problems and more truly idealistic than 



A DUALISM OF PROCESS 195 

most of the things they have been working at these 
many years. 

The hold which Monism of different sorts has had 
over the minds of most scientists and philosophers 
since the days of Darwin and Hegel has made us 
forget the distinguished place which Dualism has 
held in the history of human thought. It is seldom 
recalled that the greatest thinker of antiquity, Plato, 
was a dualist. In spite of the efforts of the Hegelians 
to convert and reform and re-create him, there is no 
getting round the fact that Plato believed in matter 
as distinct from and independent of mind, in a dual- 
ism of process between the material and the think- 
ing world, in the dual nature of man. It was matter 
which, in Plato's opinion, resisted and prevented the 
complete working out of the Ideas, so that the world 
had two realms, the mechanical and the ideal. 
Though Aristotle is often ambiguous, and sometimes 
even approximates something like Behaviorism, a 
large part of his philosophy is clearly dualistic. Des- 
cartes and Locke, to mention only the great names, 
were outspoken dualists; and if we take the philos- 
ophy of Kant in its entirety instead of leaving out 
half of it as is the wont of modern Kantians, the sage 
of Konigsberg must also be counted in the long list 



196 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

of thinkers that have upheld the dualist tradition. 
No sharper cleavage is to be found anywhere in phil- 
osophy than that between Kant's noumenal and phe- 
nomenal worlds. It was belief in a dualism of proc- 
ess not essentially different from that which I have 
been urging which formed the basis of his distinction 
between the real and the phenomenal self and the 
sure foundation for spiritual freedom and for the 
very existence of obligation which he so earnestly 
defended. It might, in fact, be said without fear of 
serious contradition that if we take the history of 
thought in its entirety there is no other subject 
upon which philosophers have come so near to an 
agreement as upon the Dualism of matter and spirit. 
The philosophy of Dualism is then in no wise new. 
It is far from being "original." Were it original with 
me or even with our generation, I should have serious 
doubts of its truth. It is as old as man's religion, 
as old as man's thought. It is voiced in the writings 
of most of the thinkers, in the words of all the pro- 
phets. In a very real sense it may be said to be the 
Philosophy of the Human Race. 



\ 



i 



LECTURE VI 

THE CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM IN MORALITY AND 

RELIGION 

In the preceding lecture I attempted to outline, in 
very sketchy fashion, and on the basis of what had 
gone before, a metaphysical position for which I sug- 
gested the name, a Dualism of Process. The implica- 
tions of such a doctrine, like those of every meta- 
physical position, are complicated and perhaps inex- 
haustible. In this, our final lecture, I wish to point 
out to you some of these implications and conse- 
quences within the fields of morality and religion. 

The bearing of Dualism upon morality and ethics 
is, I think, obvious enough. To be sure, if ethics be 
only a descriptive science, it is consistent with any 
and every philosophy. But if ethics be descriptive 
only and never normative it loses nine-tenths of its 
importance. The questions whose answers we really 
want and need are not the academic ones as to the 
customs of savages and the opinions of philosophers, 
but the practical ones: What is the difference between 
right and wrong, and What can be done about it? 

197 



198 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

Now unless the mind is efficient, nothing can be done 
about it, and you merely mock us by reciting to us 
the history of approval and disapproval. What we 
mean by moral action is impossible without responsi- 
bility; and responsibility in turn is impossible without 
some form of spiritual freedom and spiritual effici- 
ency. And neither spiritual efficiency nor spiritual 
freedom is possible for any philosophy which denies 
the existence of free %nd efficient spirits whose 
actions are not to be predicted by the laws of the 
external cosmos. 

The free and efficient self which is presupposed 
in any genuinely moral world is provided only in some 
form of pluralistic philosophy such as our proposed 
Dualism. And here we see perhaps more clearly 
than elsewhere the practical bearing and significance 
of the Dualistic Philosophy. The fundamental 
values of responsibility and individuality stand or 
fall with it. And not only Ethics, but also Sociology, 
Criminology, and Education, are vitally interested in 
the questions which Dualism raises. What attitude 
you shall take toward various social questions will 
be determined for you chiefly by the prior question 
whether you really believe in individuals as does the 
dualist, or instead dissolve all individuals in some 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 199 

great monistic melting pot, such as "Society," or the 
Absolute, or some unimaginable form of behavioristic 
protoplasm. Consider the social developments of the 
last half century. The economic view of history has 
been elaborately developed and has taught us that 
individual leadership is negligible in human progress. 
Education has more and more taken as its aim the 
turning out of masses of human product as much 
alike as manufactured articles or chemical atoms. 
Labor unions have used their strength to stifle 
unusual ability. Socialism has made mighty strides 
toward its goal of deadening individual enterprise 
and of turning men and women into cogs of an im- 
mense machine. The noble name Democracy has 
been subverted to connote an ideal of universal 
mediocrity. Now I submit that it is not without 
significance that all these intellectual and social 
movements should have been contemporaneous with 
the alliance between Naturalism and Absolutism in 
their attempt, so largely successful, at belittling the 
value and even denying the genuine reality of the 
individual self. I do not mean to suggest that a philo- 
sophical point of view has been the sole cause of 
these various movements; but I am thoroughly per- 
suaded that it has had much more to do with them 



200 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

than is commonly realized. We can have different 
pockets in our minds, but we cannot permanently 
keep their contents separate; and in the long run our 
metaphysics is bound to have its immeasurable in- 
fluence upon all our theoretical and all our practical 
beliefs. Nothing else is so fundamental as metaphys- 
ics, and hence nothing else is so important. And 
once you draw your conclusion on the central meta- 
physical problem of the mind-body relation and fol- 
low out its logic, you will find many of these tremen- 
dous practical problems already settled in advance. 
For example, once more: What shall be your attitude 
on the treatment of the criminal? Is he merely the 
outcome of heredity and environment so that his acts 
are all pre-determined for him? and hence is he to be 
regarded as an invalid to be cured? — the real guilt, 
if indeed such a thing as guilt be thinkable, belonging 
not to him but to Society, or to the original cosmic 
dust? Or is he really a moral being? Was any 
creative decision his? Did he actually choose the 
worse instead of the better course? Is real moral 
guilt involved in his deed? Is there any genuine dis- 
tinction between the sane and the insane culprit, 
and are we justified in holding the sane criminal re- 
sponsible for his crime? . . . One might multiply 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 201 

vital questions of this sort from this and other fields, 
all depending for their answer first of all upon the 
answer we shall give to the mind-body problem. 

The bearing of Interaction, with its dualistic and 
personalistic implications, upon religion and theology 
is equally great. % The dangers of religion to-day are 
extremely subtle, and are not always recognized by 
its defenders. The Atheism and Materialism of our 
grandfathers' time have wisely doffed their ancient 
costumes and have put on most gentlemanly, not to 
say pious, disguises; but behind the masks are the 
same old faces. The points of their attack upon 
Christian theology and religious belief are still as of 
old the idea of God and the idea of man. In the case 
of the former the attack is peculiarly subtle. For the 
assailants assume the form of defenders. All sorts of 
admirable, not to say orthodox, things are said about 
the idea of God. But on a careful reading of these 
defenses it transpires that God himself has quite 
evaporated. The idea of God has grown so great 
that God himself has disappeared. In fact we are 
assured that we cannot even think of God nor mean 
Him nor discuss His existence; for in all such 
thoughts and discussions the thing we are really 
thinking and talking about is just our idea. The nat- 



202 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ural derivation of this view from the excessive ambi- 
tion of psychology and an equally excessive confi- 
dence in Pragmatism is obvious enough, as well as the 
absolutely destructive consequences which must flow 
from such psychologism upon any real theology and 
any vital religion. 

The danger which threatens the Christian view 
of the individual comes in part from the naturalistic 
tendencies which we have studied at length, but it 
gets its disguise from a truly Christian source, namely 
the love of humanity. This, at least, is the way it 
appears to me, though I may be entirely mistaken 
in the matter. At any rate I have the general im- 
pression that modern social philanthropy is so in 
love with Man that it is in danger of losing all its 
love for men. Steadily and swiftly, both in theory 
and in practice, the individual is being lost in Society. 
We are so intent on "the social" that we have almost 
lost our belief in the individual. And if ever we 
take the time to think about it, Naturalism whispers 
into one ear and Absolute Idealism whispers into the 
other that the individual doesn't really exist. 

We have discussed Naturalism to the extent of 
four lectures, and a few words should here be said 
concerning Absolute Idealism. As every one knows, 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 203 

it goes in origin back to Kant. The complexity of 
intellectual threads that go to make up that remark- 
able and baffling web known as the Critical Philoso- 
phy I shall not attempt to untangle, — either now or 
at any other time. Life is too short. But I do wish 
to point out what seems to me two of the most im- 
portant tendencies in Kant's thinking — two tenden- 
cies which between them involve most of the factors 
that made up his thought. There was on the one 
hand a dualistic, voluntaristic tendency, connected 
with his doctrine of the Ding-an-sich, w r ith his belief 
in the primacy of the will, with his vindication of 
moral freedom and responsibility, and with his faith 
in God and immortality. Though this element in his 
thought was perhaps the most dear to him personally 
it was certainly the less original part of his contribu- 
tion to philosophy. The other tendency in his think- 
ing might be described as intellectualistic and mon- 
istic. It centers in the deduction of the categories 
and in the conception of the world of natural science 
as consisting of "mogliche Erfahrung, ordered and 
systematized and completely determined by the laws 
of an over-individual and impersonal experience. I 
need not remind you how most of the neo-Kantians, 
especially those of the Hegelian type, with their 



204 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

almost religious horror for every form of Dualism, 
have rejected the dualistic, voluntaristic elements in 
the philosophy of their master, and have developed 
in keenly logical fashion the implications of his intel- 
lectualistic Monism. Thus in the progression of 
Absolute Idealisms and Objective Idealisms which 
since HegePs time have grown out of the Kantian 
trunk, one can trace a fairly steady increase in the 
relative emphasis laid upon the intellectualistic side 
of the Critical Philosophy and an equally steady and 
equally consistent depreciation of the value and im- 
portance of the individual. Green and the Cairds — 
good Kantians as they tried to be — resisted this ten- 
dency to the best of their ability; but the logic of 
the system was against them. Their persistence in 
maintaining the value of the individual did more 
credit to their feeling for reality than to their feel- 
ing for Kant. Royce was not an orthodox Kantian — 
and only a "quasi-Hegelian"; yet the Kantian ele- 
ment in his philosophy was sufficiently strong so that 
when his Absolute was completed there was little left 
for human personality. Among contemporary Abso- 
lute Idealists Pringle-Pattison is still making desper- 
ate efforts to maintain some kind of real and morally 
responsible finite self; yet how such a self can be 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 205 

reconciled with his Absolute is, he admits, "neces- 
sarily incomprehensible." * It is impossible to read 
the last pages of his book on the Idea of God with- 
out feeling that he is quite non-plussed and that it 
is his heart rather than his head that persists in the 
painful endeavor to reunite two irreconcilables. The 
position of Mr. Clement Webb would be no less un- 
comfortable but for the fact that ignorance is bliss. 
The tremendous difficulties of the attempt to retain 
both human personality and the all-inclusive Abso- 
lute never cause him a moment's uneasiness — nor 
apparently a moment's thought. In spite of much 
learned and admirable exposition, the chief impres- 
sion which one takes away from a perusal of his 
recent Gifford Lectures is that of an astonishing com- 
placency, moving about in worlds not realized. 

The true implications of the Kantian Idealism are 
to be found not in theologians like Webb nor in phil- 
osophers who like Pringle-Pattison care more for the 
facts of human nature than for intellectual consist- 
ency, but in thorough-going rationalists such as Brad- 
ley and Bosanquet. For the former the self is, like 
everything else one can name, mere appearance, and 
in fact a particularly contradictory case of appear- 

1 "The Idea of God," pp. 390 and 391. 



206 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

ance. But it is especially in Bosanquet, as it seems 
to me, that we find the most consistent expression of 
the logical outcome of Objective Idealism. For him 
the finite individual has only an adjectival form of 
being. 1 It cannot be rightly called a substantive; in 
fact it cannot be rightly called even an individual. 2 
The only real individual is the Absolute! "Dissocia- 
tion and deformation, rather than unification and 
transformation, are the keys to the study of the 
finite/' 3 for the finite self is a false abstraction. The 
world of Objective Idealism is an organized system 
of universals and relations, a kind of cosmic geome- 
try. In this system what we mistakenly call finite 
individuals are simply the points at which various 
lines of relation cross. As persons possessed of will 
they have no more of original and dynamic contribu- 
tion to make than have the points of a geometrical 
diagram. The only shred of individuality left them 
is on the intellectual side, and here, in the words of 
Pringle-Pattison, they are "at best only different 
points of view — peepholes, so to speak, — from which 
an identical content is contemplated." 4 Even as 

1 Cf. his contribution to the Symposium on "The Mode of Being 
of Finite Individuals," Proc. Arist. So., XVIII, pp. 479-506. 

2 See "The Principle of Individuality and Value," passim. 

3 "The Value and Destiny of the Individual," p. 11. 

4 Symposium, Proc. Arist. So., XVIII, p. 520. 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 207 

such, moreover, they tend to merge with each other in 
an indistinguishable identity. And one school of Ob- 
jective Idealism would take from them even the con- 
sciousness which Bosanquet has inadvertently left 
them, and would interpret all finite and individual 
consciousness as some form of bodily behavior. 1 

Objective Idealism thus takes all true reality from 
the finite individual, transferring all that was real in 
it to the Absolute. How great an individual must 
then the Absolute be! Yes, truly. Emphatically the 
Absolute is individual in the literal sense of indivisi- 
bility, and also in the sense of uniqueness. But of 
the other characteristics which individuality usually 
connotes to our untechnical ears, the Absolute is as 
innocent as are we. Will, thought, selfhood, person- 
ality — the Absolute of Objective Idealism can no 
more be justly accused of possessing these very non- 
intellectualistic attributes than can the hypotenuse 
of a right-angled triangle. The Absolute which de- 
rives its descent from Kantian Idealism must in no 
way be thought of as the God of religion. Far be it 
from Him — or rather from It — to possess any of the 
personal qualities which religion longs for in its God. 



1 Cf. Hoernle, "Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics," especially 
Chap. VIII. e.g., p. 227. 



208 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

The Absolute is much too inclusive for that. 
Jenseits von Gut und Bose, it is to be characterized 
not by personal nor by moral but purely by logical 
terms. Justice, tender mercy, loving kindness — 
speak not of these in the Absolute. Its one supreme 
attribute, according to Professor Bosanquet, 1 is non- 
contradiction. 

Volition, purpose, personality, morality being thus 
banished alike from man and from God, and the con- 
trast between consciousness and matter being so far 
transcended that the reality which remains might be 
called one quite as well as the other, the world of 
Objective Idealism gradually but steadily takes on 
a strange similarity to that of Naturalism. For Nat- 
uralism need by no means assert that only matter 
exists, — as was indeed amply demonstrated years 
ago when Thomas Huxley united in his own philos- 
ophy extreme Naturalism and a modified form of 
Berkleyan Idealism. But if Berkleyan Idealism is 
partly compatible with Naturalism, doubly so is Ob- 
jective Idealism. The two are at one in almost every 
detail that is of any pragmatic importance. For both 
of them everything and every event, all human 



1 "Principle of Individuality and Value/' p. 44 f . ; Review of 
Pringle-Pattison's 'Idea of God/' Mind, XXVI, p. 478. 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 209 

action quite as much as the revolutions of the stars, 
is determined by certain external laws. Everything 
is what it is because of its relation to everything else. 
All spontaneity, all new creativeness is ruled out as 
impossible. For Naturalism human personality is an 
idle and powerless observer of events and deeds over 
which it has absolutely no influence; for Objective 
Idealism it is in some ways even less than that — an 
illusory appearance with no reality of its own. In 
such a purely logical system human freedom is of 
course unthinkable and moral responsibility becomes 
absurd. Rigid determinism rules both the natural- 
istic and the idealistic universe. In fact of the two 
the idealistic is, if possible, the more completely de- 
terministic. For while Naturalism views events as 
determined by the past only, Objective Idealism in- 
sists that they are determined by the future as well. 
Reality, in short, is for it a logical series that can be 
read backwards as well as forwards. And this double 
banning of all spontaneity and freedom, with char- 
acteristic irony, it names purpose. This interesting 
retention of old words with a new and inverted mean- 
ing is one of the notable features of this philosophy 
which in characteristically paradoxical fashion calls 
itself Idealism. In fact, after we have taken into 



210 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

account the double determinism of Objective Ideal- 
ism and its denial of all reality to the personal self, 
the chief difference between it and Naturalism con- 
sists exactly in its terminology. The worlds of the 
two philosophies are identical in most respects except 
their labels. Nothing different is to be expected in 
the one from what we must expect in the other, ex- 
cept that the old weary round is in one case called 
"material," in the other "spiritual." It is the same 
old prison house with a new coat of paint. 

If we refuse to allow ourselves to be duped and 
hypnotized by the lofty vocabulary of Objective 
Idealism, the world with which it presents us is one 
that has very little left for the religious man. It is, 
therefore, somewhat surprising that so many of its 
most enthusiastic advocates during the past century 
should have been deeply religious men and that 
their advocacy of it should have been so largely 
prompted by their religious interests. The propa- 
ganda of German Idealism in England, from the time 
of Coleridge to the death of Edward Caird, the simi- 
lar spread of it in this country by earnest and devout 
men such as the late Professor George S. Morris, 
and the preaching of something vaguely like it in 
Germany by that admirable and very lovable and 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 211 

hopelessly vague preacher, Rudolf Eucken, all these 
movements have had in them much of the spirit of 
the religious missionary. A number of elements 
have contributed to this peculiar result, Perhaps 
most fundamental of all is the undeniable emotional 
appeal which some form of Absolute has always 
had and always will have over many minds, But an 
almost equally fundamental explanation, as I view it, 
is to be found in the fact that the religious supporters 
of Objective Idealism to whom I have referred never 
fully grasped the logical consequences of their own 
presuppositions. Personally I am convinced that 
these consequences are just about what Bosanquet 
and his school have depicted. But I am also con- 
vinced that the Cairds and Morrises and the rest 
would never have been satisfied with the Bosan- 
quetian Idealism. Not seeing as clearly as Bosan- 
quet and Hoernle what was involved in their pre- 
suppositions, they tried to retain in their philosophy 
really incompatible ideas, and they were lured on to 
stick to the Absolute, spite of apparent inconsisten- 
cies, in the hope that thus the triumph of the ideal 
over the actual might be logically demonstrated and 
that, in the form of the Absolute, God might be pre- 
served. Their hope for the triumph of the ideal 



212 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

has been realized: — but let it be noted how this has 
been accomplished. Objective Idealism demon- 
strates the victory of the ideal by identifying the 
ideal with the real. The Ideal is eternally trium- 
phant — but what is the Ideal? Ah, we finite "peep- 
holes" of the universe must not arrogate to ourselves 
the privilege of determining by our own feelings and 
purposes what the Ideal is. If we would find the 
Ideal we must look to the Real and see what it is 
that is eternally triumphant. Whatever that may 
be, that is the Ideal; and thus we have proved its 
triumph. 

Once the true inwardness of Idealism's vindication 
of the Ideal has been made clear, I doubt if the re- 
ligious soul will find much comfort therein. And the 
same is true of the concept of the Absolute as a sub- 
stitute for God. There is no doubt, to be sure, that 
the thought of the Absolute brings at times a certain 
sense of security and peace. But the peace is like to 
be that of the dead wilderness or of the geometrical 
diagram, and the security is abstract and verbal only. 
In the oft-quoted words of Professor James, the Abso- 
lute "gives us absolute safety if you will, but it is 
compatible with every relative danger. . . . What- 
ever the details of experience may prove to be, after 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 213 

the fact of them the Absolute will adopt them." * As 
Professor James used to point out in his class-room, 
Absolute Idealism would find itself as amply demon- 
strated and as completely fulfilled in the veriest hell 
as in the most blissful heaven. 

I have dwelt thus at length upon Absolute Ideal- 
ism because I believe it is of the utmost importance 
for the leaders of the religious life to understand its 
true significance and to refuse to be hypnotized by 
its noble vocabulary. As a support for the religious 
life Absolute Idealism is a broken reed. It contains 
elements and tendencies essential to its very structure 
which are bound to lead to the repudiation of most 
of the things which religion holds most dear. It is, 
to be sure, the inevitable outcome of the Neo-Kantian 
form of Idealism, but that does not necessarily imply 
that it is true. In my opinion, indeed, no one can 
maintain its truth without flying in the face of some 
of the most indubitable facts of life. In the words 
of Pringle-Pattison, it is the substitution of a "logical 
analysis of knowledge" for "an account of living ex- 
perience." 2 

If neither Naturalism nor Absolute Idealism is 



1 "A Pluralistic Universe," p. 126. 

2 Symposium, p. 519. 



214 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

consistent with the facts of experience or compatible 
with the demands of the religious consciousness, 
whither shall we turn? Personal Idealism is pro- 
posed by a number of philosophers both in this coun- 
try and in England as a form of thought designed ex- 
pressly to meet the present emergency. And indeed 
much can be said for it. All of the important values 
of religion and morality are by it preserved. Noble 
as is the edifice which it would erect for us, however, 
I am constrained to point out that it is founded on 
something dangerously like the sand. For either the 
personal idealist must take refuge in some form of 
Panpsychism or else build his philosophy on Kant- 
ian foundations; and more likely than not he will 
try both. Each of these courses has its great dan- 
gers. Panpsychism — at least without Kantian sup- 
plementations — leads one into a fantastic construc- 
tion of external nature and leaves one almost re- 
sourceless before the problem of nature's laws; and 
on the other hand, to quote Perry's lively figure, 
"once the Kantian theory of knowledge is accepted, 
Personal Idealism is on a slippery inclined plane with 
the Absolute waiting at the bottom." 1 You get the 
picture. An enormous crocodile of an Absolute with 

1 "Present Conflict of Ideas," p. 218. 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 215 

jaws extended at a terrifyingly obtuse angle, waiting 
at the foot of a steep and slippery plank, down which 
is shooting the pathetic figure of the personal idealist 
destined in no time to make one more little meal for 
the All-inclusive. There is no escape for him; he 
will easily be swallowed in one small gulp. For the 
Absolute cannot be expected to make two bites of 
even a personal idealist. 

Though with all my heart I wish the best of for- 
tune to the personal idealist in his exciting adventure, 
I have no wish to sit on his inclined plane. % So great 
respect have I for the Absolute that I mean to take 
no chances and to come nowhere near him.*" To drop 
the figure, it seems to me that what the times call 
for in philosophy is not a Personal Idealism but a 
Personal Realism, — a philosophy that should be 
frankly and thoroughly dualistic, a recognition of the 
fact to which unspoiled experience seems so plainly 
to point, that the world of matter and the world of 
spirit are not made of the same stuff. Such a phi- 
losophy would be in a peculiarly favorable position 
for reconciling the conflicting claims of natural sci- 
ence and of religion and morality. It would apply 
the so-called "scientific method in philosophy" to 
those regions of reality to which it patently applies 



216 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

and for which it was made; while for the realm of 
the spirit it would reserve that more intuitive and 
empirical method which "Spiritual Pluralism" would 
extend, at much cost, to the whole world. Thus it 
would to some purpose render unto Caesar the things 
that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are 
God's. A discussion of the feasibility of such a Real- 
ism, however, would involve us in an epistemological 
excursion for which there is here no time. I will 
therefore merely say in passing that, for reasons 
which I have in part indicated elsewhere, 1 I regard a 
philosophy of Personal Realism perfectly sound epis- 
temologically ; for the purposes of these lectures, how- 
ever, I shall be glad to join forces with the personal 
idealist and with all others who, whatever they may 
think of the world's ultimate substance, agree with 
me in finding in the world at least a Dualism of 
Process. 

Such a Dualism, whatever its view of the ultimate 
substance, seems to me the only genuine Idealism. 
A genuine Idealism, I call it, because it both refuses 
to bring down the ideal to the actual and at the same 
time asserts that though the ideal is not actual now 
there is a living possibility of its progressive realiza- 

1 "Essays in Critical Realism." 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 217 

tion. Such a Dualism, I believe, is the only philo- 
sophical position which can safeguard the spiritual 
interests of man. I am aware that to many this will 
sound paradoxical in the extreme. For all of us, I 
suppose, from the very beginning of our philosophical 
. education have been informed repeatedly and au- 
thoritatively that Monism is the only spiritual Welt- 
anschauung; and the dualist has been so anathema- 
tized that the name has become almost a reproach to 
a philosopher. Who has not heard the taunt, "Ah, 
sir, if you maintain that, you are a dualist!" — a 
taunt to which no reply is possible. In spite of which, 
let me say it again, Dualism seems to me the only 
position that can safeguard man's spiritual interests. 
Nor do I know of any philosophy that can better sat- 
isfy the demands of the religious consciousness. And 
I think this can be shown not only by an analysis 
of the teachings of Dualism, with its vindication of 
the personal self, of freedom and responsibility, 
but also by a review of the great religions of the 
world. 

That Islam is frankly, even crudely, dualistic, I 
expect no one would seriously deny. Dualism is, of 
course, at the very heart of Zoroastrianism, with its 
magnificent picture of the cosmic struggle between 



218 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

Ahura Mazda and Angro Mainyu, and its inexhausti- 
ble incentive to the soldiers of God. Hinduism nat- 
urally presents a more complex problem; for Hindu- 
ism itself is so complex that what is true of one aspect 
of it may not hold of another. Plainly the world- 
view back of the religion of the Rig Veda, as well as 
the world view involved in the popular polytheistic 
Hinduism of to-day, is dualistic (in our sense of the 
word), as well as pluralistic. When we come to the 
Advaita Vedanta of Cankara, however, we are faced 
with one of the most absolute of Monisms. Yet it 
friust be observed that the Monism of the Vedanta 
is of a peculiar sort. Thoroughly idealistic though 
it is, it has but little in common with the Kantian 
Idealism. Among the post-Kantians, it is Fichte to 
whom it is most akin. But even here the difference 
is considerable. Kantian Idealism was founded and 
post-Kantian Idealism has been developed with the 
structure of natural science constantly in view. 
Logic and natural science between them form in a 
sense the skeleton or ground plan of the world pic- 
ture which Kantian Idealism gives us. All this is 
completely lacking in the Vedanta. The Vedanta 
begins and ends not with the world of natural science 
but with the self. Both forms of Idealism — the east- 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 219 

ern and the western — divide the world into two 
parts, — appearance and reality. They draw the line 
between the two, moreover, in about the same place. 
But while for western Idealism the world of science 
is real and the self is an illusion, for the Idealism of 
the East it is the world of natural science that is 
illusory and the self alone that is real. From this 
difference it has resulted that, as we have seen, Kan- 
tian Idealism has steadily approximated to the posi- 
tion of Naturalism, whereas the Vedanta, in spite of 
its rigorous insistence upon a monism of substance, 
has from the beginning upheld a view of body and 
soul which in no essential and pragmatic principle 
differs from the dualism of process found so com- 
monly in the teachings of religion. For though the 
Vedanta insists that there is but one reality, that 
this is spirit, and that the body and the whole ex- 
ternal world is but illusion, a dualism of great prag- 
matic significance breaks out within this monism, — 
the dualism, namely, between the illusory and the 
real. Illusion has its ways of acting and its tre- 
mendous grip upon the finite spirit; it must be dom- 
inated, it must be brought into subjection if the spirit 
is to be free and to realize its own inherent divinity. 
Hence for the Vedanta there is much the same strug- 



220 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

gle between the spirit and the flesh, much the same 
dualism within man and within the world, that is to 
be found in the other religions. If this is true of 
Cankara's Advaita Vedanta, even more obviously 
does it hold of the less monistic interpretations of 
the Vedanta, of the religion of Bhagavad Gita with 
its personal God, and of the philosophies of the Great 
Sects. And not only these but all forms of Hindu 
religious thought lay their unfailing and their su- 
preme emphasis upon the soul. Here, I believe, is 
the central point of them all, here is the fundamental 
Credo which makes Hinduism, in spite of its bewil- 
dering sects and branches, in some true sense one 
religion. In their thought of God they vary through 
all the phases of polytheism, theism, pantheism, and 
atheism; but in their insistence upon the reality and 
the supreme importance of the self, and its contrast 
to the external world of matter or illusion, in this 
they are at one. 

Nor is the case very different with Buddhism, in 
spite of its denial of the kind of substantial soul which 
the Vedanta teaches. For even the doctrine of the 
Founder, as handed down in the Southern Buddhism 
of to-day, recognizes a very real self, — namely the 
union of the will to live and the moral character 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 221 

(Tanha and Karma) * which, upon reflection, will be 
found to constitute a very good substitute for the 
substantial ego of the other Indian faiths. Northern 
Buddhism, moreover, has largely returned to a belief 
in a substantial ego; and as a pragmatic matter, 
wherever you find Buddhism you will find a recog- 
nition of the struggle between the spirit and the 
flesh, and a sharp distinction between the world of 
matter and the world of mind. 

If now we turn to regions of religious thought 
nearer our own, we find the religion of ancient Israel 
frankly and naively dualistic. All things, indeed, 
were made by God, but the world of matter and the 
world of individual finite spirits are never identified 
nor confused. This dualistic view was as a matter 
of course taken directly over into Christianity. Nor 
was it in any way diluted, rather was it strengthened, 
by the contribution which was early made to Chris- 
tian theology from Greek thought. I am aware of 
the fact that it is customary with contemporary ob- 
jective idealists to read into Plato their own Kantian 
and Hegelian views, and to dub as non-Platonic most 
of the things that Plato actually said. Plato, it 

1 See the admirable and, in a sense, authoritative presentation of 
the matter in Subhadra Bhikshu's "Buddhist Catechism" (Colombo, 
1908), pp. 36-37. 






222 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

seems, was a forerunner of the truth, one who saw it 
in prophetic vision from afar, and who in relation to 
Bosanquet is to be classed, if not indeed among the 
Prophets, at least among the Sibyls. The hopelessly 
non-historical nature of such an interpretation of the 
great Greek thinker I need hardly point out. I 
merely submit that any fair reading of what Plato 
actually wrote — a reading of the lines instead of a 
reading between the lines — will bring out with great 
emphasis the contrast, so constantly dear to his 
thought, between soul and body, between spirit and 
matter. A consideration of the intellectual atmos- 
phere of the Fourth Century B.C., moreover, con- 
firms this dualistic interpretation of Plato. We must 
not forget that among the chief influences playing 
upon him were the teachings of Socrates and of the 
Orphics; and both of these, notably the latter, were 
profoundly dualistic in their view of man and nature. 
In fact one of the chief effects which Platonism had 
upon Christianity was to carry into it much of the 
Orphic dualism. 

For only by a willful shutting of our eyes to the 
facts and by an arbitrary construction of a so-called 
Christian theology to suit our personal and passing 
taste, can we deny that Christianity from its origin 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 223 

on has been profoundly dualistic. The fancy of our 
age for Spencerian Unknowables, for Naturalistic 
Monisms, and for Hegelian Absolutes may make us 
forget the essential position within the Christian 
faith of the contrast and the war between the flesh 
and the spirit, but nothing is more fundamental to 
it than they. In the words of Professor Alexander, 
"At the core of the Christian religion there is a 
dogma which cuts deep to the truth of human nature. 
It is the dogma of the antithesis and struggle of the 
flesh and the spirit, of the World and the Word, the 
dogma of the suffering and striving man, which is 
nowhere so vividly expressed as in the terrible image 
of St. Paul, — 'the world is crucified unto me and I 
unto the world.' " * And one might say with no ex- 
aggeration that all of the Christian faith and hope 
center around a conception of human personality and 
its superiority to the laws of matter and force, for 
which neither Naturalism nor Objective Idealism can 
consistently make room. 

The discussion of this topic might be expanded to 
almost any length, but I think I have said enough 
to remind you of what every student must be aware, 



1 "Apologia pro Fide." Presidential Address at the 19th Annual 
Meeting of the Am. Phil. Assn., Phil. Rev., XXIX, p. 119. 



224 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

namely, that the great religions of the world, includ- 
ing our own, have not only been essentially and pro- 
foundly dualistic, but that they have found in that 
Dualism the only means for a spiritual interpretation 
of man's nature and for a hopeful outlook upon his 
destin}'. This contrast between the laws of spirit 
and the laws of matter, and the faith based upon it, 
has, in fact, been the very kernel of their truth, the 
vital part of their teachings which has survived the 
breakdown of creed and dogma and the wreck of the 
endless details of the ancient faiths. For it is this 
dualistic view which in its application to man forms 
the very root and core of the moral struggle and of 
the eternal hope. It points to what is man's tragedy 
and his glory. Consider him: rooted and anchored 
in a particular piece of matter which he only very 
partially dominates, definitely limited and localized in 
time and space, he yet feels his own innate transcend- 
ence of the body and with Plato knows himself a 
spectator of all time and all being; through his body 
the inheritor of the beast, yet also in part not beast, 
realizing himself as more than animal and certainly 
more than nerve cells and tissues, as more than a 
passive peephole of the Absolute's world, feeling 
within himself a power of real initiative and moral 






CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 225 

responsibility, and at times guessing and hoping that 
he is somehow akin to something divine to which he 
stretches out his hands. 

If Dualism be true, there are two orders of being 
in this world: the one the natural order of mechanical 
causation and regular sequence which science stud- 
ies; the other the order of mind and of personal ac- 
tivity. This latter we may well call the supernatural. 
If I really am a self and a free agent, and if my will 
be not an illusion, then whenever I raise a stone from 
the ground by the exertion of my arm, directed and 
determined by my will, I thereby interfere with and 
interrupt the predictable sequences of the merely nat- 
ural world. There are, as religion has always 
taught, two realms, the natural and the supernatural; 
and you and I belong to the latter. Whether the 
Supernatural Realm — the realm of spirit — reaches 
out beyond our ken and includes other and non-hu- 
man selves and perhaps a God — this there is no time 
here to discuss, and this, I should add, is still chiefly 
a matter not of knowledge but of faith. But if we 
accept the dualistic philosophy, this much at least 
we know: that the Supernatural Realm exists, be- 
cause you and I are members of it. "Beloved, now 
are we the Sons of God." 



226 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

"Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet 
appear what we shall be." But if Dualism be true 
there is good hope that when He shall appear we 
shall be like Him; and that the death of the body 
shall not be the end of us. Without some form of 
dualistic philosophy I do not see how we can have 
any personal hope at all. If the soul be an epiphe- 
nomenon of the brain, it will perish when the brain 
ceases to function. If it be merely a stream of con- 
sciousness, it lacks that identity and that character 
which are needed to give meaning to immortality. If 
it be merely a "peephole" in a Bosanquetian universe 
it is of the essence of transciency, except in that, 
like our bodies and everything else which passes 
away, we do, to the extent of having lived at all, just 
so far characterize the world's past. In Bosanquet's 
words, "It is natural to suppose that our brief exist- 
ence is the temporal appearance of some character of 
the whole. . . . While we serve as units, the Abso- 
lute lives in us a little and for a little time; when 
its life demands our existence no longer, we yet blend 
with it as the pervading features or characters which 
we were needed for a passing moment to emphasize 
and in which our reality enriches the universe." * 

1 Symposium, p. 506. 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 227 

That is all. Only a philosophy which recognizes in 
us men genuine individuals, real on our own account, 
and which teaches that the laws of matter and motion 
do not completely determine the existence and activi- 
ties of the spirit, — in short only a dualistic philosophy 
is compatible with any significant form of personal 
immortality. But such a philosophy is not only com- 
patible with it; it goes a long way toward making it 
probable. 

For if it be true, as we have found reason to be- 
lieve, that the body is in a real sense the tool of the 
mind, why must we believe that when the tool is 
destroyed the mind which used it also perishes? To 
be sure, as we know them here, the two cooperate, 
and the mind can express itself only by using the 
material tool to which it has become organic. In no 
instance, therefore, can we find an expression of the 
mind or self which is purely spiritual. Always it 
must submit itself, to some extent, to the nature of 
the tool which it uses. To do this is the precondi- 
tion of its expressing itself at all in this world and as 
we know it here. But all this is no argument for 
identifying the self with the body or for concluding 
that when the body ceases to function the self also 
ceases. The tones which we hear from the violin 



228 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

when the master plays it — are they due to the artist 
or to the instrument? Surely to both united, each 
limiting and each aiding the other. Yet for all that 
we do not identify the one with the other nor say 
that since the tones come immediately from the violin, 
therefore there is no master and none is needed. To 
say this would be the wisdom of Monism. But we 
who are not monists believe that behind the wood 
and horse-hair and cat-gut of the machine we can 
trace the hand, — yes, and the personality— of the 
master. Suppose now the violin be broken; must we 
conclude that therefore the violinist also ceases to 
exist, or that, at any rate, he can never play again? 
Surely not if we be good dualists. We know that in 
this universe there are other instruments on which 
the master may play. And have we reason to be 
sure that only violins can be replaced? 

But I need not dwell longer upon this aspect of the 
question. For it must be obvious to all that if Dual- 
ism be true, then, as Socrates said long ago, "it be- 
hooves us to be of good hope about death." And 
indeed we can do no better than turn back to our 
Plato; for almost all his many arguments upon the 
subject come really to this: that the mind being dif- 
ferent in nature from the body and subject to dif- 



CONSEQUENCES OF DUALISM 229 

ferent laws, there is no good reason to suppose that 
the death of the body is relevant to the life of the 
mind. 

A quarter of a century ago there were discovered 
in Southern Italy a number of graves made by the 
ancient Orphics. In each there was found, bound 
round the neck of the dead man, or clasped in his 
hand, a golden tablet, with an inscription which com- 
bined directions for his entrance into the next world 
and a brief epitome of his faith. One of them reads 
thus: 

"Thou shalt find on the left of the House of Hades a well- 
spring; 
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress. 
To this well-spring approach not near. 
But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory, 
Cold water flowing forth; and there are Guardians before it. 
Say: I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven. 
But my race is of Heaven alone." 

The inscription is incomplete. Another tablet, of 
which much is lost, begins abruptly: 

"I am parched with thirst and I perish. Nay, drink of me, 
The well-spring flowering forever on the Right where the 

cypress is. 
Who art thou? 
Whence art thou? I am a child of Earth, and of Starry 

Heaven/' 



230 MATTER AND SPIRIT 

In these last words, repeated from tablet to golden 
tablet, and held in the pathetic grasp of hand after 
clinging hand, as if the whole hope of the future 
hung, as indeed it does, upon the truth of the line, 
there is expressed the central faith not only of the 
Orphic religion but of all religion, the fundamental 
assertion of the mind's self-consciousness and of the 
heart's desire, as well as the essential teaching of the 
dualistic philosophy. I am a child of Earth — yes, 
that is plain, alas, all too plain; but a child of Starry 
Heaven too. 



INDEX 



Absolute Idealism, 199, 202, 204, 

205, 207-213 
Alexander, H. B., 223 
Aristotle, I77> 195 
Attention, 81-85 
Atwater, W. O., 150, 151 



Fechner, 55, 161 
Franz, S. I., 155 
Frost, E. P., 122 

God, 179, 201, 211, 212, 225 
Green, 182, 204 



Bawden, H. H., 158, 159 

Becher, 140 

Behaviorism, 111-129, 131, 160, 

161, 165, 195 
Benedict, F. G., 150 
Bergson, H., 155, 169, 170, 194 
Berkeley, 63 
Bode, B. H., 92-96 
Bosanquet, B., 98-102, 205-208, 

211, 22.2 y 226 
Bradley, F. H., 205 
Breese, B. B., 83 
Buddhism, 220, 221 

Busse, L., 119, 142, 174, 183, 194 Islam, 217 

Israel, 221 
Calkins, M. W., 177, 178 
Christianity, 8, 166, 201, 202, 221, James, W., 78, 79, 80, 83, 109, 

222, 223 
Clifford, 11, 78 
Conservation of Energy, 10, 11, 



Haeckel, E., 21 

Head, 155 

Hinduism, 118, 119, 120 

Hoernle, R. F. A., 104, 211 

Hoffding, H., 55 

Hume, 136, 137, 140, 178 

Idealism, 133, 183, 184, 193 

Immortality, 226-229 

Individual, 198, 199, 200, 202-207 

Interaction, 5, 6-1 1, 15, 41, 95, 
99, 132-156, 160, 161, 162, 165, 
168, 169, 173, 191, 192, 194 



156, 169, 170, 213 
Kant, 195, 196, 203, 204 



Ladd, G. T., 140, 141 
Laird, J., 181 
Lashley, 124 
Lasswitz, 55 
Locke, 195 



60, 99, 101, 103, 142-152 
Critical Realism, 37, 45, 216 

De Laguna, 113 

Descartes, 10, 33, 90, 195 . 

Dewey, J., 96, 188, 190 

Dualism, 99-102, 165, 166, 183, Lovejoy, A. O., 96, 125-128, 161, 

184, 185, 186, 187-196, 197, 198, 162, 194 

203, 204, 216, 217-230 

McDougall, W., 180, 181, 194 
Ethics, 197, 198, I99> 200 Materialism, 5, n-47, 48, 73, 89, 

Eucken, R., 211 94, 95, 99, 103, 118, 132, 146, 

Evolution, 11, 186-190 160, 165, 201 

231 



232 



INDEX 



Mind-dust Theory, 78-86, 169 
Monism, 184, 192, 195, 217, 228 
Montague, W. P., 22, 29-35, 42, 

46, 146 
Morris, G. S., 210 
Munsterberg, H., 51, 78 

Naturalism, 9, 10, 11, 15, 36, 38, 
39, 41, 49, 120, 158, 165, 166, 
184, 199, 202, 209, 213, 223 
Natural Selection, 16, 17, 18, 88 
Neo-Realism, 104-111, 165 

Objective Idealism, 97-105, no, 

in, 204, 205-213, 223 
Orphics, The, 222, 229, 230 

Panpsychism, 58, 59, 63, 64, 67, 

73, 193, 214 
Parallelism, n, 15, 24, 41, 48-88, 

89, 90, 95, 99, 132, 160, 161, 165, 

194 
Paulsen, 59, 60, 61, 62, 71, 72, 

88, 161, 174 
Perry, R. B., 214 
Personal Idealism, 214, 215 
Peterson, 118 

Picard, M., 81, 82, 83, 84, 85 
Plato, 8, 166, 195, 221, 222, 224, 

228 
Pragmatism, 92-97, 134, 202 
Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 204, 205, 

206, 213 



Religion, 201, 217-224, 230 
Richardson, 176 
Royce, J., 204 
Russell, B., 137, 138 

Santayana, G., 22 

Self, 172-181, 198 

Sellars, R. W., 22, 36-46 

Sheldon, W. H., 171, 194 

Singer, E. A., 122 

Socrates, 228 

Spencer, H., 78 

Strong, C. A., 22 f 23, 24, 64, 65, 

69, 80, 84, 85, 86, 87, 188, 189 
Stumpf, 142, 144, 146, 148, 192, 

194 



Unity of Consciousness, 77, 78, | 
79-85 

Vedanta, 218, 219, 220 

Warren, H. C, 13, 14, 22, 24, 25, 
26, 27, 28, 29, 35, 46, 52, 56 

Watson, J. B., 113, 121, 122, 123, 
124, 126 

Webb, C, 205 

Weritscher, 145 

Wuitdt, 135, 142, 14S 

Ziehen, 51 
Zoroastrianism, 217, 218 



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